[Freeciv-Dev] Re: suggestion for smaller dialogs

["Ross W. Wetmore" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Buttons, are useful for context insensitive actions like 
PREVIOUS/NEXT/CANCEL (and it would really be useful if listed
objects like city reports had the first two for cycling through
the list).

The operation of SELECT and BUTTON action is a really poor 
paradigm as (amongst other reasons)
1) it requires significant mouse movement from the select to
   the button location.
2) it means context sensitive actions for different selected 
   types are not possible or require additional effort to grey 
   out irrelevant buttons.
3) the labels require significant permanent real estate on the
   base display.

A better paradigm is a context sensitive popup menu on SELECT with
the double click executing the default action. The menu can be
tailored to resolve all the above characteristics cleanly.

If in addition, you wanted some visible hints to possible actions
that work on a selection, you could group a set of drop down menu 
buttons for various categories of operations or actions ("Orders", 
"Reports", ...) across the top, bottom or side depending on your 
preference.

In such a system, the German menus could carry the full ToolTip 
help message without impacting the base display or Menu flavours
for more compact languages.

Cheers,
RossW
=====

At 04:23 PM 01/09/30 +0200, Karl-Ingo Friese wrote:
>Hello there,
>
>as already stated by others before, some dialogs take enourmous space
>on the screen; especialy in some localized versions. Two ideas to
>solve this:
>
>As I just tried out, a simple '\n' between two words make the button
>display the text in two lines. This might especialy useful for the
>localized versions of the player report, for example the german
>one. This works if I changed the hardcoded default text, I dont know
>about the NLS stuff. Could the translators try this out ?
>
>The city report has to many buttons, meaining, it is wider than
>it needs to be. One could either
>
>o split them into two rows or
>o for the begining, get rid of the "popup" button since this
>  more easily done by a double click on the row containing the
>  city (which already works).
>
>Comments on this would be wanted.
>Ingo
>-- 
>
>Karl-Ingo Friese
>kif@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx