Re: Dia's user interface

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Adrien Beau wrote:
> On Sunday 21 April 2002 14:43, Lars Clausen wrote:
>>
>> If there are any,
>> could you point out the worst problems that Dia has in its
>> interface?  I'd like to turn some attention to that as we
>> work towards a 1.0 release.
> 
> It's a minor problem, but it seems to me that "Diagram modified!"
> is almost always displayed in the status bar. If I understand
> correctly, it is just a file modified indicator.
> 
> First error with that: never ever shout at your users. No
> exclamation mark. Personnaly, in the few GUIs I've written,
> I've only used excl. marks in "impossible case" dialogs
> (where assertions would be better, but I don't use Java 1.4
> yet). Always be calm and nice to your user. Especially when
> there are problems.
> 
> Second error with that: it's way too big for its purpose.
> It's distracting to have this status message ever present.
> Why not do what Vim (and others probably) do? Put a * in
> the window title, as in "varicella.dia *", when the file
> is modified, remove it when the file is saved or undo
> operations bring the diagram back to the state that was
> saved (the latter one being not necessarily easy).

I agree with you on this.  I have considered removing the !, but I never
thought of removing the whole string.  Three randomly sampled GTK programs
(Sodipodi, Gnumeric and Gnucash) don't have any indication of modification
at all.  Gedit has "(modified)" in the window title, whereas Gimp prepends
a *.  I think we should go with the *.  Since we warn before closing a
modified diagram anyway, the information is not that important.

Now's the question:  Is there some more relevant information to put there?
Currently selected tool?  Number of objects selected (after a select
operation)?  Something?

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?