[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Nation dialog

[Alan Horkan <horkana@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:

> Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 04:50:52 +0000 (WET)
> From: Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: freeciv-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [Freeciv-Dev] Nation dialog
>
>
> I have been making a new nation dialog for the GTK+ 2.0 client. The design
> has been finished as well as 70% of the code. You can see a screenshot
> here:
>
> http://www.freeciv.org/~vas/nation.png
>
> I've strived to make a dialog which follows the GNOME Human Interface
> Guidelines. The old dialog was just too visually cluttered. Not to mention
> friggin HUGE:

i only recently started reading this list (and some of the archives), and
this is my first post to the list.  i dont know how you do things around
here so if this feedback is not welcome then please politely say so and i
wont bother you agian.  I am not an expert, but an enthusiastic amateur
who has done some reading and study.  "I dont know what art is but i know
what i like" and mostly i can analyse why i like it that way.

based purely on the screenshot i have a little* feedback, which i hope
will be contructive.

Firstly this is a substantial improvement and seems far more flexible for
the future when Freeciv will inevetabley have rulesets for even more
nations.
If GTK dialogs allow you to skip down a list by typing the first few
letters of a word it would be even better but that has nothing to do with
freeciv.

having both pictures and text is brilliant (for example icons only makes
it hard to distinguish Irish or Ivory Coast, Italian or Mexican and text
only is harder to scan quickly (only a contrived example)).

I am always glad to see a developer who keeps in mind smaller displays
when they design, until very recently i was still using a very small
monitor.  Even better, but much much harder would be to make a dialog that
resizes nicely for different displays (perhaps if the "nations" box was
resizable).

The alignment of the elements seems a bit off.
I would have put "Leader" so that it aligned with "Robert Menzies".
I would have put City Style top aligned rather than center aligned agains
the list (but i am not sure what the HIG says on this, I need to
properly read through the pages I link to rather than just skim reading).

"Select a nation" with "Nation" right underneath it seems redundant.
I never much liked those outliner boxes and would simply remove it.
This section of the HIG about Frames seems to back me up.
http://developer.gnome.org/gup/hig/1.0/controls.html#controls-frames

The task order is different from the old dialog which is a little
disconcerting.  (I see it as 2 columns and i read from right to left so in
effect it is pick nation, pick leader, pick city.  The old dialog was one
column, pick nation, pick city, pick leader).
Have you tried arranging the new dialog as a single column?  (I have no
idea if this would be better, i am totally biased by my personal
preferences and being familiar with the old dialog).

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/windows.html#alert-spacing
not and ideal example but hopefully you will agree that a little bit more
layout space around the Quit,Disconnect,OK buttons would look nicer and
more consistant.  More about layout in this section of the HIG.
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/layout.html#layout-capitalization

Again I really hope this was constructive criticism.
Thanks for the software.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

* in hindsight that was more than a little feedback.