Guess I am becoming a usability nazi

I guess the ‘just works’ philosophy of GNOME have made me assume that whenever something works in a non-optimal way by default it is ‘broken’ codewise so I don’t check if there is a way to change its behaviour. So for a long time I have been irritated by the Gaim message ‘window list’ entry continuing to ‘blink’ even after I read a message (only going away when I reply). Today I ended up taking a look at the Gaim preferences and discovered that there is an preference entries to make it stop blinking on focus or mouse click. Not sure if its truly needed functionality or just options put in to cover up broken default behaviour. Anyway Gaim behaves the way I want it now, which is good :)

There is a mock-up for a new print config dialog available for viewing. Not sure if I like it or not, but it might just being based on FLTK makes it looks weird. What struck me that its a bit strange to have page full of settings, and then have a button with the name ‘settings’ at the bottom. ‘DJ5850 Specific Options’ or something like that might be a better name for the button. According to a mail on the osdl list that button should bring up a page with multiple tabs worth of settings, so I guess those tabs will be named ‘More settings’, ‘Even More settings’ and ‘Most settings’ :)

8 thoughts on “Guess I am becoming a usability nazi

  1. gaim sucks! it doesnt follow the gnome HIG and has many usability problems.
    lets admit it, the only reason it is part of gnome and so widely used, its because there is no better option! :(

  2. I don’t really like this new print dialog because the size of the window is constantly changing. You can’t resize the window to fit, and then use it. A lot of people with massive screens miss problems like this.

  3. I don’t like the new printing dialog.
    The size changes are annoying, and there is no benefit by having multiple of these “vertical tabs” open, is there?
    Basically this is a tabbed interface with four tabs, so why not use tabs? Everybody uses tabs, and most people are used to them…

  4. “Basically this is a tabbed interface with four tabs, so why not use tabs? Everybody uses tabs, and most people are used to them…”

    I like it — with Tabs you don’t get a summary of the information, here I can see “1up on Letter, 3 copies” and know I don’t have to click the “tab” to change it – I am happy with the settings.

    Just a user’s point of view

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