[maemo-developers] AppMenu, Filters and HIG

[From: Claudio Saavedra]

On Mon, 2009-05-25 at 22:24 +0200, Cornelius Hald wrote:
> Hello again :)
> 
> To not make the other threads more cluttered as they are already, here's
> a new one.
> 
> I'm trying to another window fully conform to the Fremantle HIG, but I'm
> not sure that I understand the paragraph on Filters:
> http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/beta/hig/html/ch04s02.html
> 
> The window is a window to select a particular note from a list. The list
> has two columns: The title of the note and the date when it was last
> changed.
> Using a simple GtkTreeView it is displayed with a header row which
> offers sorting, this means the list can be sorted in four ways:
> - Sort By Title Ascending
> - Sort By Title Descending
> - Sort By Date Ascending
> - Sort By Date Descending
> 
> Here is a screenshot of this window:
> http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/search_window.png
> 
> As you can see, I could probably display one more note, if I would
> remove the header row. If I read about Filters it sounds like I
> could/should use them for this purpose because in the documentation I
> read "... For example, sorting alphabetically a list of contacts ...".
> 
> I tried putting those four sorting options into a filter, but it doesn't
> work because the filters are shown in one row and the strings are just
> too long for that. This would be the result:
> http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/search_window_with_long_filters.png
> 
> I know that Filters are supposed to work like this, therefore I would
> like to get some insight on what the appropriate way is to handle this
> situation.
> 
> 1) Keep the header row and not use Filters at all?
> 2) Remove one column, so that only one column is left?
> 3) Use filters, but different?
> 4) Something completely different?

This is the purpose of filters, but you might need to find strings that
fit well in the menu. Repeating "Sort by" in each one of the buttons is
wasting too much space. Restricting the sorting criteria might also help
(for example, keep both criteria but only in one direction, etc).

Claudio