Re: [Mldonkey-users] GUI cleanups, continued

[Goswin Brederlow]

Ivo <address@hidden> writes:

> As promised, here follows a list of things I deem wrong or not perfect in the
> GUI. This pertains to mldonkey_gui, not mldonkey_gui2. Is _gui2 still under
> development/maintained, by the way?

Not by my patches. Is that wanted? should I port my patches to gui2 too?

> A lot of this stuff basically comes from the fact that the GUI hasn't been
> perfected yet, or at least I think so. It may also be partly so that the GUI
> will break in places based on the GTK theme, screen resolution/window size,

The theme also breaks localisation. With some themes the gui stops
displaying text when it hits a ö, ä, ü, ß,...

> and that sort of thing. Still, it should scale well onto a wide userbase,
> rather than just a few installations where it has been tested. I suppose there
> are ways to make it look good on different configurations (some apps seem to
> pull it off just nicely).

The top structure of the gui is derived from *.zog files. That looks
like a gui creationg/editing kit to me. Hopefully that has theme support.
 
> - I think the GUI should remember some of its settings. It already remembers
>   window size and sets it to the same as the previous session. I'd like it to
>   remember the width of my columns (let's call it "table headers" in HTML
>   terminology) as well. I find myself having to drag the Name column in the
>   downloads view, for example, to see the entire filename.  Either it's too
>   small by default (default widths could be a little saner, to be honest) or 
> it
>   should just remember the size when I exit.

If you click at it it resizes to fit the columns contents. It resizes
all columns. Once thats a good idea. But it makes it impossible to
resize some tabs and then resort.

The gui should remember the size, yes. Also a double click between two
columns (instead of draging it to a different size) should resize to
fit the left column. A click in the middle should just sort. Thats how its 
usually
done and it allows all operations to be performed.

> - I haven't used the Friends tab ever, really, but a couple things do puzzle
>   me. For one, I see double. :) Two trashcans, two hands with "Download"
>   beneath them. I also have no idea what the left Download panel is for. It's
>   not very clear.

Directories and files. Most people don't share directories.

> - There is no consistency throughout the entire GUI where prompt/field
>   convention is concerned. At some places, you'll find a
>   "Search Timeout [     ]" (and why is there a dot after the value that's in
>   it?? Like '120.' Lose the dot) and at another you'll see a
>   keywords: [      ] prompt. Note the colon (:).

120. is a float, 120 an int. Its a missing "int_of_float" and
"float_of_int" pair.

MfG
        Goswin