[maemo-developers] GtkAction vs. AppMenu

[From: Cornelius Hald]

Thanks Berto for all the good input and for explaining the decisions
that have been made. I wasn't really aware that radio buttons are
discouraged and that toggle buttons should be favored. Now that I know
that, I changed the code again to use toggle buttons and everything
works as expected. So there is no immediate need for you to check my
example - I still would be interested though ;)

Here are two screenshots. The first is the menu in Diablo, the second is
the same menu in Fremantle.
http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/diablo_style_menu.png
http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/fremantle_style_menu.png

Now the only thing to do is to remove the "Increase Indent" and
"Decrease Indent" buttons from the Fremantle menu, because only 10 items
are allowed and currently there are 12.

Another thing is, that if you compare those two menus, you can easily
see that the Diablo menu has more structure due to the use of
separators. I'm not yet sure how to get back this structure, but I'll
make some experiments. HIG suggestions are welcome as well :)

I think that we really need updates to the Fremantle style guide
especially we need lots of screenshots that show us developers how our
applications should look and behave. Also we need more advice on how to
convert common functionality from Diablo to Fremantle. The problem with
the text box inside a scrollable area comes again to my mind. Or how to
use filters properly (which will be an extra thread soon).

Many people (like me) are just developing in their free time, which is
mainly in the evenings or on the weekends. The experiments with the
Fremantle UI were taking my complete development time during the last
two weeks. The application I'm developing is really small and has not
much of an UI so it should be straight forward to adopt the program to
the new look and feel and shouldn't take longer then one evening.

Hmm, maybe this mail was a bit chaotic, but I think we really need to
document this process better to help people getting there apps ready for
the next tablet. Otherwise people will not adopt the new API and the
programs will still have small menus, big scrollbars, small scrollbars
and generally will just look inconsistent. I mean I'm really happy that
my job is not to port maemo-mapper which has around 90(!) menu items....

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that there is now a way for creating
completely finger friendly UIs and I'm happy that alpha and beta code is
available. I'm just saying we need to make it easier for developers to
use this API. Whether this is by changing the API or by creating better
documentation or by doing something else doesn't really matter. It just
should be easier :) Then again - maybe I'm the only one having this kind
of problems?!

Cheers!
Conny