Re: [Denemo-devel] Tooltips - what am I doing wrong?

[Richard Shann]

On Wed, 2015-11-18 at 17:15 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> Hi;
> 
> On 18 November 2015 at 16:55, Richard Shann <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> >> > But in the longer term we are coming up to a crunch - the people
> >> > developing Gtk are clearly only interested in a narrow group of users.
> >>
> >> Defining "narrow" as "the group that I'm not in" is not conducive to
> >> an honest discussion.
> >
> > which is why I didn't do anything so idiotic as to define narrow as "not
> > my group". But you could very reasonably argue that "wide" equates to
> > large numbers of users and narrow to a few. Whereas, what I had in mind
> > is wide equating to diverse and complex uses and narrow just to the
> > popular simple uses. You can send an email and switch to a calendar and
> > lookup a web page with a simple interface comprising a few gestures, but
> > you can't do complex technical tasks efficiently that way.
> 
> You still haven't demonstrated that "changing tooltip delay",

a complex task can be helped by having tooltips on every thing the user
might click on, it turns out that having such a density of tooltips
results (I am told at the start of this thread) with popup tooltips
happening continuously and, since 3.10 uncontrollably.

>  having
> frame widgets draw a box,

a complex task can be helped by dividing the feedback to the user up
with frames round the different bits.

>  or dropping tear-off menus, 

a complex task can be organized into a hierarchy of menus, which when
you arrive at the right one it is convenient to tear off and use as a
palette. Denemo now has palettes and a right click on the menu item
allows the user to place the menu item as a button in a palette...

> equates to
> "performing complex tasks"
>  — unless, obviously, you consider the
> current Denemo UI the only way to perform complex tasks,
> in which case
> I strongly encourage you to look at the wider world of user
> interaction and design, including in the proprietary world.

No, I don't consider it the only way of doing the job, but re-designing
the program is not appealing to me personally, since "it ain't broke"
and my interest is mainly in what the program achieves and how easily
and musically it achieves it, not whether it works in a similar way to
the email program I use.

Having said that, Denemo's user interface is evolving - the palettes
feature mentioned above will mitigate the lack of tear-off menus. I
don't relish reworking the tooltip system, though again, for menu items
at least, that is mitigated by the help available by right clicking the
item rather than waiting for the tooltip.

But really, this last one just seems like a bug - Denemo is not unusual
except by using tooltips as much as possible. So if people are finding
Gtk>3.10 makes Denemo unusable it would seem to merit a bug report.

Richard