[Gossip-dev] Accelerator key inconsistencies

[CJ van den Berg]

[snip]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 01:56:43PM +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> In Gossip, Ctrl+W closes a tab.
> In GIMP, Ctrl+W closes a window (showing an image).
> 
> The correlation here is that they close a "document" or "instance", what
> ever you want to call it. Ctrl+W is not used anywhere else in GIMP or
> Gossip (iirc).

And how is the roster *not* a document? If I can edit it, it's a document as
far as I'm concerned.

> I see now reason to make Ctrl+W close anything else in either case.
> 
> > > Personally, I think the Ctrl+W issue is perfect as it is. It works the
> > > same as GIMP and I like that. 
> > 
> > Does it really work the same? How do you hide the Gimp tool window?
> 
> The same way you close the roster window.
> 
> > > The difference between close and hide is measured by the functionality
> > > that the application provides. For example, I would expect the
> > > difference between hide and close for the chat window to be almost
> > > non-existant. But for the roster window, I would expect that difference
> > > to be, hide the window and close the application.
> > 
> > Please, *I* understand this, and *you* understand this, but it just doesn't
> > make any sense to a normal user. Please show me just *one* other window on
> > the GNOME desktop that has a hidden state and a closed state and the
> > differentiates between the two in the UI.
> 
> Skype does the exact same thing EXCEPT it doesn't have an option in the
> UI to toggle this behaviour, it is hidden, you can only do this by
> clicking of the notification area icon. The only difference is we
> provide an option visually in the roster window menu and notification
> icon menu.

The skype application does *not* exit if you close the roster window.
Neither does Ekiga, Gaim, Gajim, Psi or Kopete.

So for all of them, close == hide.

> In fact, you will find that MSN Messenger does this too and probably
> other instant messaging clients. The whole hide/minimise/don't close on
> 'x'/etc thing is quite different for IM clients, so comparing to the
> rest of the desktop is pointless if you ask me. Users understand this.

I don't have a windows box around here to check, but I really doubt MSN is
any different to the rest in the list above. It's been a (long) while since
I used it though.

> Users that see the main menu as:
> 
> Hide Roster
> ---
> Quit
> 
> Are NOT going to be confused by that are they, especially when other i'm
> clients have same or similar behaviour.

"Other" clients apparently *don't* have similar behaviour.

Besides, no-one said the menu would confuse anyone. We were talking about
accelerator keys and the window close button.

If you want to leave it the way it is, that's fine with me. I didn't really
want to get on a soap box about this. The fact that it is inconsistent
stands though (IMHO).

-- 
CJ van den Berg

mailto:cj at vdbonline.com
  xmpp:cj at vdbonline.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.imendio.com/pipermail/gossip-dev/attachments/20060809/3ce68f11/attachment-0001.pgp