Re: "move" tool

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On 9 Sep 2003, Glauber Ribeiro wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lars Clausen [mailto:lrclause@cs.uiuc.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 08:53
> To: dia-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: "move" tool
>
>
> [...]  As for whether to
> change name -- "Hand" is not a good name for a tool.  It seems to me that
> "Scroll" is very clear on what it does.  So might "Pan" be.
> ---------------------------
>
> Icons are tricky things. If you're speaking English, "scroll" works
> because the name of the thing is also the verb that means the action
> you're indicating. But to me (a Brazilian), a picture of a scroll doesn't
> automatically make me thing of the "scroll bars" in the GUI.
>
> I think the hand can be both for moving (grabbing) a single object or
> panning (grabbing the paper). On the other hand :-) here in the US, to
> say that "dia has hand" will make people think of an episode of the
> defunct TV show Seinfeld.

Now we need to be clear on what we're calling what.  The suggestions are

1) Change the icon (that is, the picture shown in the toolbox) to a hand
   icon, like in Acrobat Reader and others.  This should work
   internationally because of the metaphor used in the pointer of grabbing
   the diagram and moving it around.

2) Change the name of the tool, as seen in the tooltip and the Tools menu,
   from "Scroll" to "Hand" or "Pan".  This would be translated into the
   appropriate word for scrolling around (resp. using the hand or panning)
   in pt_BR.

We don't want to change the icon to look like a scroll.

You bring up an interesting side-point, though, that one would think that a
Hand tool can grab objects as well.  That would make some sense, but I also
think there's a lot of value in not having to change tool all the time
while fiddling with layout.

-Lars "Not in this release" Clausen

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| HĂ„rdgrim 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?