Older blog entries for CharlesGoodwin (starting at number 1)

28 Feb 2004 (updated 28 Feb 2004 at 11:51 UTC) »

After seeing some dreadful suggestions [1] for the AbiWord Table of Contents dialogue [2], I used Glade to create a mockup that better represented the expectations of the average user.

Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) it wasn't well received.

"Not representing functionality..."

Some people have no imagination; what did he think the 'Custom Style' button was intended for? Since the advanced stuff had already been represented [1] I didn't think I needed to redo what had already been done.

Anyway, Dom pointed out that cascading dialogues are a no-go (and from a usability perspective I do agree, I wasn't really thinking clearly at 1am last night) so I'll redo the mockup with an 'advanced' tab instead and this time I'll make the damned advanced dialogue too.

I have to say, Glade was quite fun to use. It has a few annoyances [3] but I really don't see what the complaints are about. Then again, I come from a box-based layout background with my work on XWT so I quickly understood how the layout worked. It's only major shortcoming is the lack of undo/redo functionality - quite annoying when you accidentally delete a container when you meant to delete a widget.

[1] Like this and this - the thread contains more details

[2] Martin Sevior has done some wonderful stuff on adding TOC functionality to AbiWord; it updates live (no having 'update field' like in MS Word) among other nifty features

[3] The two thinks that irked me were 1) not initially showing the widget-view yet it is needed to display any existing windows when you open a project and 2) how do I get rid of the damned label on a checkbox - 'empty contents' just left a gaping grey hole

Now I have an online journal thanks to advogato.org!

I'm tired and I've really been procrastinating on getting the Gnome Office website up to scratch. I did a lot of good design work in a 36 hour period but have failed to live up to the billing since then...

I've got to incorporate some of the themes from Ryan Pavlik's design. I've got some good ideas on how to do this, but I've been stuck recently trying to do a Gnumeric SVG icon.

However, since then I've been working much harder on XWT. The project is being renamed to Ibex, so the work has all been in the 'Ibex namespace'. Once we have a few demos we'll make a few big announcements and impress a few people.

Anyway, time to go for a run and get some energy going in order to aid motivation.

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