[maemo-developers] GtkAction vs. AppMenu

[From: Alberto Garcia]

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 10:44:50PM +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:

> > Toggle-like radio buttons are quite common too in many user
> > interfaces.
> Not that I can think of.

Well, I haven't made a list :) but out of the blue I can think at
least of the GIMP, Audacity, OpenOffice/MS Word/Abiword/Gnumeric,
the iPhone... and I'd swear I saw them in the Moblin 2 UI too. But I
wasn't only thinking about computer interfaces, they're used in some
home appliances too.

> Well, toggle buttons that act like radio buttons is confusing.

Not if the UI is well designed. E.g. if you pack them together and set
clear labels or icons I don't think it's confusing at all. And taking
into account that all Fremantle apps are going to be like that I don't
think there's that much room for confusion.

A standard toggle button can also be confused with a normal button for
that matter, and we're not talking about removing toggle buttons, are
we?

But let's take a more extreme example: MS Word/OpenOffice/Abiword/etc.
not only mix toggle buttons and toggle-like radio buttons, they're
also located next to one another! :)

> But given that the Fremantle UI guidelines force us to have them,
> surely the very existence of any real radio buttons will confuse
> the user, making them even less likely to understand that these
> non-radio-radio-buttons actually act like radio buttons. So I still
> feel that you should just change the appearance of radio buttons and
> thus make both the UI and API simpler.

Well, it seems clear that you don't like toggle-like radio buttons at
all.

As that's Gtk code rather than Hildon, I think that you should talk
to the maemo-gtk maintainers and also file a bug against Gtk in
bugzilla.gnome.org to deprecate gtk_toggle_button_set_mode() and make
that feature themeable.

> Of course, I know it's too late to change any of this now, so I'm
> just complaining. These kinds of mistakes are always made when
> development is allowed to be done in isolation for a while, just as
> the initial Maemo API had many obvious mistakes.

I don't think it's late. What you're complaining about is Gtk API
that has been there for at least ten years, and there's nothing that
prevents us from making all radio buttons look like toggle buttons in
Fremantle and make gtk_toggle_button_set_mode() a no-op.

So go ahead. As I said before I think it's fine as it is now but I
don't have a very strong opinion about it either. So if you convince
the maemo-gtk maintainers to change GtkRadioButton I'll respect their
decision.

Berto