Re: Project 'Make X-Chat's UI not suck'
Nice; I was just bitching about this on IRC earlier this evening. ;-)
One recommendation I'd have is to lose the "Global user information"
from the server selection dialog - it's a dialog for server selection,
after all. ;-) Perhaps have a button for "User configuration" or
something like that as the alternative action in the dialog, perhaps?
You might want to bring usability@gnome.org into this too, they are
great there when it comes to helping getting a good UI. ^,^
On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 18:05, Joe Drew wrote:
> This is probably of interest to debian-gtk-gnome-ers, too.
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
>
> From: Joe Drew <hoserhead@woot.net>
> To: xchat-discuss@nl.linux.org
> Subject: Project 'Make X-Chat's UI not suck'
> Date: 24 Feb 2003 17:34:49 -0500
>
> In my experience, X-Chat as an IRC client is great. However, for new
> users and less technical people it leaves a lot to be desired. I aim to
> change that.
>
> The first problem is that X-Chat's interface is very busy. There are a
> lot of buttons and toggles, and a lot of "close" or "open" buttons where
> there need not be any. In addition, there are some pretty bad UI
> decisions, like radio buttons which reveal UI elements (principle of
> least confusion applies here.)
>
> To that end, I've started with simplifying the Server Selection
> dialogue. I've chosen to adhere to the GNOME interface guidelines,
> because it's a very good set of user interface ideas, and also because
> most GTK+ 2 programs will tend to use it.
>
> You can see the current progress (my dialogue is on the left) at
> http://capricorn.woot.net/~jdrew/xchat-serverlist.png . My current plan
> is to cause Edit to open a dialogue with the same contents as the "edit"
> mode of the current server dialogue (tweaked, of course, for usability).
> Add will probably be a very similar dialogue with "Network name" empty
> at the top. Currently, both Add and Edit are non-functional, a
> deficiency I plan to fix.
>
> I'm writing to solicit comments, suggestions and (yes) even flames. I
> have no desire to create my own IRC client or to fork X-Chat; all I want
> is an great IRC client with a UI that doesn't suck.
>
> Thanks,
> Joe
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