Re: [Mldonkey-users] GUI cleanups, continued

[Zoggy]

Hi,

*** About icons :
I'm far from good at designing icons, I rather get some from there and there, 
sometimes puting two icones into one. But if you're good at this, or if you 
find better icons, feel free to send them to me so i can add them and replace 
the old ones. BTW, you can change the icons in the ~/.mldonkey_gui.in file, in 
section
icons = { .... }

In the File/Settings -> Gui/Layout, you can choose wheter buttons contain icon, 
text or both.

I know the icons look cheap for the moment, but it was better than nothing :-)

*** About missing space between fields :
I'll try to make things look better, but don't expect huge spaces, because 
there is a lot of information to display and we must think about poor users 
with small screens :-)

I agree that fields labels should be corrected to be consistent regarding the 
colon (':').

*** Let's continue:

> - I'm not sure what widgets there are for resizing panels, or whatever they're
>   called again in GTK, but I personally dislike the little box thingies which
>   you have to drag with left mouse button pushed. I prefer draggable borders.

These are called Paned widgets in Gtk and they're designed for this. I don't 
know about draggable borders in gtk.

> - 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
> ...
>   should just remember the size when I exit.

I'll try to stick to the recommandation of Goswyn for column sizes.


> - 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.

The let download is to doanloa w whole directory, for protocols keeping the 
structure of friends's shared directories (eg Soulseek).

> - Queries tab. Boy, this sure is confusing. All sorts of weird letters and
>   rectangular white spaces. :) For one, I don't understand the &'s at the top
>   of each section. They don't make much sense to me and should be removed.
>   The 'keywords:' prompt should start with a capital K. There should be more
>   space between each section (it'd certainly fit and would make things much
>   clear). The input fields should be aligned below eachother, rather than
>   immediately after the prompt (like,
>   <td>Keywords:</td><td><input type=text></td> sort of thing). I again see
>   some repetitiveness in icons. That's the third time I find that hand icon.
>   :) Perhaps instead of showing the blank options by default, we should show
>   sane defaults, or maybe even a <Make a Selection> type of thing. In the case
>   of media, an 'all' option would be more clear. For fields that only contain
>   small (in string length) choices, the input field could be made much
>   smaller, like in the case of Min Bitrate and Format.

'&' means that the field in the frame will be in the query in the form of 
field1 & field 2 & ... 
You can define your own skeletons of queries in the searches.ini file.
I agree that the render could be improved but that's quite a pain to do and 
time is missing.
For the empty combo fields with no value, leaving them blank is good for me 
since that means 'no value' so 'no constraint in the query', rather than 
'select a value' making the user think this value is mandatory.

> - Another hand :) and the column width thing again, of course. But I should
>   not repeat myself. The running and made queries at the left get overlooked
>   soon. This tab is reasonably simple and uncluttered, but it could be a
>   little better still. Perhaps the 'x results' status line could stand out a
>   little more, as could the tabs for the different queries.

Agreed for the number of results. And I'll see what can be done for the tabs.
 
> - Rooms tab: another tab I never use. Some sizes and locations seem badly
>   chosen here, resulting in some stuff only getting half shown, like column
>   headers. Otherwise, I don't know what to say about this one.

Rooms barely work by now, if I remember well. Don't really know how to display 
the information (all rooms, rooms wher i am, people in the selected room where 
i am, chat window). Any good idea ? Four vertical frames should be avoided 
because it does not leave enough space for chat on small screens.

> - The screens/tabs from File> Settings also have the problem with unaligned
>   input fields. They should go neatly beneath eachother, rather than directly
>   after the prompt. This applies to everywhere in the GUI, even the Colors
>   tab. Some buttons only get half shown here and there (Remove button in
>   Columns Titles, which by the way should be called "Column Titles" to be
>   correct English). I think the table padding (or spacing? I always confuse
>   those) should be bigger. The prompts/ends of the fields are to close to the
>   window border.

The fields in the settings box won't be aligned because i use a library of mine 
to easily create the fields, and it does not take all fields's width into 
account. I don't have time to change this by now and does someone else think 
it's ugly ?
But i agree that the 'columns titles' tab should be cut into various parts to 
be more readable and not to hide buttons.

> In the hope that this is useful,

I can't promise this will be done quick since i'm quite busy for the moment 
(beginning of a new job...).

anyway, thanks for your report,

-- 
Maxence