Re: GNUstep User Interface

[Andreas Heppel]

On 2003-06-27 15:11:58 +0200 Dennis Leeuw <dleeuw@made-it.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This a very early release of a new guide I am trying to write.
> The idea is to document the GNUstep UI elements in such a way that the
> guide can be used as a user reference to completing tasks. Alexander
> Malmberg was kind enough to give me a list of (almost) all elements
> within GNUstep to work on.
That's a really good idea.

> I wrote a little piece to illustrate how I want to set things up and how
> I want to go forward. All is however open for debate :)
> The initial thingy can be found at
> http://documents.made-it.com/GNUstep/UI/GUI.html
One thing I don't really like about this, is the section about managing 
windows. Though WMaker may still be the "official" window manager for GNUstep 
(and probably will be for quite a while), I don't consider it a good idea to 
bring this into a GUI guide for GNUstep. It might make ppl think that both, 
GNUstep and WMaker, make up some kind of union, and that at least GNUstep 
depends on WMaker, which is not the case. And in the long run, WMaker as 
"official" window manager might be replaced by InterfaceWM, for instance, or 
some other. I also believe that ppl should be familiar enough with their 
window manager, thus, there being no necessity for a detailed explanation of 
how this works.

> What I would like to ask is what do you all think of this approach and
> it's usefulness. And another thing I would like input on is which
> elements of the GNUstep UI can be described best with which useful
> tasks.
> Thinking about normal users I can only come up with two real things a
> user wants to do:
> 1) Working with applications
> 2) Manipulating files
> I guess this sums up what people do with computers :)
> To incorporate all UI elements in just these two chapters might be
> difficult to do.
Probably yes. You may want to have an additional chapter "GUI elements", where 
you explain the workings of a control in more general, i.e. not application 
dependant way. This may be supported by screen shots of real examples, of 
course. In such a chapter it may be explained, waht a certain element is 
usually used for, how it it works etc. with references to existing examples.
In the applications chapter you will rather have general stuff on apps, such 
as starting and stopping them in different ways (from the command line, by 
clicking on a file icon in Workspace...), what an app generally consists of 
(menus, windows, panels, inspectors,...)...

Cheers,
Andreas


--
Andreas Heppel

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Home: http://www.andreasheppel.de

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