GTK frontend, more user-friendliness problems to solve
Hi
if i've understand well it seems to be not so easy to implement the
global progressbar so, since more thinking on it is needed, we could
just put the idea in the wishlist.
Anyway there are some problems related to the user friendliness of the
debian installer that need to be solved
*When a main-menu step is completed the next step is "highligtened"
because by putting focus on the corresponding button in the main-menu in
the left area of the screen.
This could be not so clear a newbie to the debian instalation system,
nor is clear that clicking on the highlightened button in the main menu
or on the forward button are equivalent actions (in newt this problem
doesn't arise since the next step to do is clearly marked)
I came up with two solutions
-Bold text inside the button that has focus on it (is this possible in GTK?)
-The text (example : "Configure the network" ) could be wrapped between
"->" and "<-" (it would be then "-> Configure the network <-")
Anyway the second workaround would make the text inside buttons even
longer, and with some languages (japanese, russian.. ) the main menu row
already occupies half of the screen (see snapshots posted by christian
perrier on i18n mailing list).
*When just main-menu is displayed the actionbox area remains empty: we
could use it to
-display a nice tux/debian logo
-random advertisments as someone proposed :)
-Give user informations about the next step to be configured (we could
show the extended desciption related to the button in the main menu that
has focus on it)
*When network is being configured autimatically by dhcp or when files
are being copied onto the harddrive we should gray out the main menu and
the next/back buttons to let the user understand that he just has to sit
down and wait for the installation to complete(meanwhile we could
display something inside the action area).
I know there are still more important problems to think about but i
think it wouldn't be bad starting to think about user-friendliness of
the installer, since switching to GTK from NEWT comports many problems
like those i've mentioned above.
ciao
Attilio
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