[bt-devel] UI improvements (was: Re: Development after 2.0 final )

[Jonathan Marsden]

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:

> First, the b.s. manager needs space only for the Install page source
> lists. Making the network warning dynamic and taking it away gives
> couple of lines more for the list. We could also save the size. Then the
> user would need to make it higher only once and next time it would have
> the same height which is good for the user. I think this would be easier
> than calculating the height.

Easier to implement, probably.  Easier for users... not so clear; it
might be easier (more friendly) if the initial dialog height were
"automatically" larger, on screens that have the height available.

Is doing *both* of these things a possibility?

>> 2. The Bookshelf Manager initially offers to store new modules in
>> /usr/share/sword which is not writable. I know it tells you about this
>> after you try to add a module. How about not showing any path that is
>> not writable.

Or, IMO better, how about prompting for credentials so you *can* write
there... via kdesudo/gksudo/etc.  This makes the shared data space a lot
more useful :)

> ATM it lets people add paths which are not writable. How about
> preventing that?

Those added paths may have modules already installed under them.  Those
paths may be to a CDROM or DVD... etc.

> Therefore it would be best to prevent selecting a non-writable path from
> the dropdown selector, or maybe not showing such paths at all.

Again, those paths may have modules (installed by a user with
appropriate credentials, or burned into optical media) already
installed, so not showing them at all is a clear loss of functionality.

> BTW, the selector should save the selection between sessions.

Yes, that would be a UI improvement.

> 5. A larger, but necessary, task is to do something to the display
> window toolbars. They are a shame for us. Usability is very bad if the
> display window is narrow. Try for example some general books with a
> narrow window. Lexicons or Bibles are not much better.

Really?  How narrow are you thinking about here?  I tried WHNU and KJV
with BT around 250 pixels wide and 800 pixels tall (closing the
Bookshelf/Mag/Bookmarks windows of course), and it is still reasonably
usable/readable for me.  That's about 20% of the width of a 1280x1024
screen, which is pretty narrow.   Once you make BT narrow enough that
the horizontal scroll bar appears, sure, it's awkward... but that's
*way* narrow, even on a VGA 640x480 screen that would be very narrow!

> 6. Some people have complained that opening modules (display windows) by
> clicking a module name isn't intuitive. Maybe we could add text to the
> empty display area shortly describing how to open modules.

Interesting idea.  It might be more valuable to have the File Menu act
more like a conventional file menu... and include open and close
commands that work on (installed) modules?  File -> Open is in some
sense "intuitive" for anyone who has used a word processor or
spreadsheet in the last decade or so, I would think.  At the moment, the
File menu just having Quit in it seems a bit of a waste of a top level
menu, to me.  I was surprised by that the first time I ran BT.  Also, if
you had a File -> Open dialog you could have an icon for it in the icon
bar, too.

Bear in mind that the only really "intuitive" interface is the nipple --
everything else is learned!  So no computer interface is going to be
"intuitive" in the abstract, it is just going to be similar to something
else the user has already seen and used and learned.  The majority of
desktop PC users have probably used an office product of some sort, or a
text editor of some kind, so File -> Open is relatively likely to be
familiar to them.  Even web browsers have File -> Open ...

Jonathan