[Gossip-dev] 0.11 Feedback

[foser]

On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 19:58 +0200, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 9 maj 2006 kl. 16.49 skrev Aredridel:
> 
> > On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 11:14 +0300, Kaloian Doganov wrote:
> >> 	The click-status-icon to close tab feature seems highly
> >> 	counter-intuitive.
> >>
> >> It is also annoying.  Now it became dangerous to switch between tabs
> >> using the mouse, since there is high degree of probability to hit the
> >> icon and close the same tab that you want to look at.  The tabs are
> >> relatively small, so you must be extra careful.
> 
> Though not much more dangerous than having a close button (except  
> that you see it directly *and* the tab is wider due to the extra  
> button).

The problem of invisibility is really that the behaviour is not
predictable by visual cues. The user will not know what happened when
the window suddenly dissapears/the tab closes when he/she misclicks.
Especially considering all window closing buttons are aligned top-right
in default gnome, top-left is an illogical choice.

> Yes, this is a "when you know it it's useful" features. Comparing  
> Gossip chat windows to Epiphany, Gnome-terminal, GEdit is counter  
> productive. Please stop, they have the luxury of wide windows  
> compared to Gossip.
> 
> Having a close button on the right hand side of the label takes up  
> and wastes a lot of space and forces you to widen the chat windows  
> just to compensate for lack of space due to a mostly unused button.

All close buttons are hardly used, 1 time at most for any widget, so
it's rather unused in most cases. Wide chat windows are actually better
than narrow ones, reading text in continues lines is easier than with a
lot of line-breaks.

> I think that there are two viable solutions other than the current  
> (that works fine imho when you have noticed it's there and the same  
> solution used by Adium in Mac OS X).
> 
> 1) Have Firefox-like close button. Ie. one button at the far right  
> targeting the open tab.

Reasonable, but still not in line with any other gnome
tab-with-close-button.

Since this use-case is not described in the HIG afaics, I would suggest
taking it to the usability list.

http://live.gnome.org/TabImplementation
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72101

- foser