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