From: Curtis M. <cum...@mt...> - 2004-03-16 00:39:41
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On Mon, 2004-03-15 at 06:00 -0800, Christian Hammond wrote: > It's a good thing then that we're not targetting production > environments. We're scratching an itch. You're free to roll your own > packages of gaim with the package. Heck, if it'll stop this > mind-boggingly stupid thread, you're encouraged to roll your own > packages. This thread has been going on for a day less of one month by my count. Its obviously not just an itch. What is the problem with adding an option to a prefs pane that only has one option on it as it is? If we make tooltips enabled by default, why should you feel so strongly that they not be able to be turned off? I don't even care so much about the tooltips myself, what bothers me is people requesting things, someone (in this case two people) spend the time making it happen, and we're just pretty much told to suck wind. I thought it would be helpful and a good way to introduce myself to the source code. What I expected was a response like, hey if you want to add a prefs option, you need to do this in addition to this, and not do this as you've done here. Oh well. -- Curtis Magyar |
From: Gary K. <gr...@re...> - 2004-03-13 05:50:59
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I actually wrote a patch to do this awhile ago.. it's burried somewhere in the patch tracker... |
From: Brian J. T. <bj...@co...> - 2004-03-16 10:52:36
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i heartily agree that this thread has gone on for far too long, and it's sad that it seems to have devolved into a "devs vs. users" rant, but something slightly amusing (to me at least) struck me in this last email: Curtis Magyar wrote: >This thread has been going on for a day less of one month by my count. >Its obviously not just an itch. What is the problem with adding an >option to a prefs pane that only has one option on it as it is? > > my first thought was "huh?" until i opened up the "Interface" prefs panel, something i never notice (despite that the prefs open to this panel) because of its absolute uselessness. perhaps i'm misunderstanding this pref, "Display remote nicknames if no alias is set", but doesn't this seem like the most useless pref ever? i mean... if no alias is set, what _are_ you going to display other than the 'remote nickname' (whatever that is, i assume it's prpl-specific and basically boils down to the account name or the account's 'nickname' field if one exists). if you want to think of it in havoc pennington's terms[1], this mostly-useless pref is taking up one of the 'available preferences slots' and should be removed. going through the other prefs panes, there are lots of areas where they could be improved and simplified (while still retaining similar or identical functionality). i understand that the core devs are busy with other things, and that the prefs panels aren't exactly a priority (hell, i _hate_ messing with prefs panels; that's usually the last thing i fix long after i add new features). so, let some non-core-dev people mess with them. why not add something that people actually seem to care about, like a "Show buddy information tooltips" pref? i would (and i'd bet a potential patch writer would) be willing to eliminate the aforementioned useless pref and add a show/hide tooltip pref in one patch. let's ignore for a minute that win32 gtk is broken and causes usability issues with the tooltips in certain situations. it seems from this thread that there are probably enough "legitimate" users that want to disable them simply by preference. please, everyone (both devs and users), i know there's a lot of emotion clouding this issue right now, but don't let all of the idiotic "if you don't give me a pref you're biting the hand that feeds you" (etc.) comments in this thread deter you from adding something that may easily be useful to a significant number of people out there. and really, even after all this crap, it's not "caving in to the annoying nagging users" to accept this at this point. if not a pref, is there some way of fixing this issue to make everyone (both the whiners and the existing happy userbase) happy without a pref? my apologies for continuing in beating what may be a dead horse. for the record, i love the tooltips and would never want to turn them off (for one thing, it makes periodic procrastinative away message reading so much easier), but i can understand why some people would. having said that, i think i'm going to go and do some long-overdue work on one of the prefs dialogs for a project[2] i'm working on. -brian [1] http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html (most of the way down the page) [2] http://xfce.org/ (yeah, sorry, shameless plug) |
From: Ka-Hing C. <ja...@ja...> - 2004-03-16 11:29:01
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On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 05:52:25AM -0500, Brian J. Tarricone wrote: > my first thought was "huh?" until i opened up the "Interface" prefs > panel, something i never notice (despite that the prefs open to this > panel) because of its absolute uselessness. perhaps i'm > misunderstanding this pref, "Display remote nicknames if no alias is > set", but doesn't this seem like the most useless pref ever? i mean... > if no alias is set, what _are_ you going to display other than the > 'remote nickname' (whatever that is, i assume it's prpl-specific and > basically boils down to the account name or the account's 'nickname' > field if one exists). If that preference is unchecked, gaim would show the screenname/email address/ account number/ID of the buddy if you don't have an alias set locally. -khc |
From: Christian H. <ch...@gn...> - 2004-03-16 19:37:05
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On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 05:52:25AM -0500, Brian J. Tarricone wrote: > i heartily agree that this thread has gone on for far too long, and it's= =20 > sad that it seems to have devolved into a "devs vs. users" rant, but=20 > something slightly amusing (to me at least) struck me in this last email: >=20 > Curtis Magyar wrote: >=20 > >This thread has been going on for a day less of one month by my count. > >Its obviously not just an itch. What is the problem with adding an > >option to a prefs pane that only has one option on it as it is? > >=20 > > > my first thought was "huh?" until i opened up the "Interface" prefs=20 > panel, something i never notice (despite that the prefs open to this=20 > panel) because of its absolute uselessness. perhaps i'm=20 > misunderstanding this pref, "Display remote nicknames if no alias is=20 > set", but doesn't this seem like the most useless pref ever? i mean...=20 > if no alias is set, what _are_ you going to display other than the=20 > 'remote nickname' (whatever that is, i assume it's prpl-specific and=20 > basically boils down to the account name or the account's 'nickname'=20 > field if one exists). This is actually less useless than you think. The remote nickname isn't the screen name. Let's say you're on MSN, and you don't have an alias for everybody. However, one of your buddies just set his nickname to: "The ants go marching one by one hurrah, hurrah! I LOVE YOU Jennifer :X:X:X:X:X:X:X:X:X" This is not as uncommon as it sounds. In fact, it's far more common than most people care for. It's ugly and horrid, but MSN users can and do use this functionality. Now, if the user is in your buddy list, the simplest solution of course is just to set an alias. What if you're a developer on a large project though, like Gaim? Or just somebody else who receives several e-mails a day from users not on your buddy list. Suddenly that preference starts becoming a lot less useless. You'll only see the jen...@ho... instead of the gigantic waste of space above. Christian --=20 Christian Hammond <> The GNUpdate Project ch...@gn... <> http://www.gnupdate.org/ "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." -- Thomas A. Edison |
From: Curtis M. <cum...@mt...> - 2004-03-16 22:31:11
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On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 05:52 -0500, Brian J. Tarricone wrote: > my first thought was "huh?" until i opened up the "Interface" prefs > panel, something i never notice (despite that the prefs open to this > panel) because of its absolute uselessness. perhaps i'm > misunderstanding this pref, "Display remote nicknames if no alias is > set", but doesn't this seem like the most useless pref ever? i mean... > if no alias is set, what _are_ you going to display other than the > 'remote nickname' (whatever that is, i assume it's prpl-specific and > basically boils down to the account name or the account's 'nickname' > field if one exists). Oh for christ sakes. We're trying to add an option, and you go looking for ones to remove? -- Curtis Magyar |
From: Tim R. <om...@ho...> - 2004-03-14 07:17:33
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> > >Absolutely. Tooltips are used in many apps as learning aids, and the >reason people turn them off is because they can be distracting once you >no longer need them. People will not be at equal levels of competence >in all their apps. > > I just thought I'd point out that while some of Gaim's tooltips fall into the learning aid catagory, the main one that people talk about is the one for buddies in the buddy list, which is an informational tooltip. It's not the sort of thing you turn off to take off the training wheels. And for those who use it, a large delay would be annoying. xgrimx says he wrote a patch a while ago to make tooltips a preference, those wanting that feature might want to try it out, if they compile from source. (I'm not suggesting using a 3rd party patch indefintately is a solution, only that it's an option right now.) Any patch adding a new preference is probably going to break the string freeze, btw. So even if you were to talk KingAnt and SeanEgan into it, it wouldn't happen in 0.76. While we're on the subject of tooltips, I think the the HIG talks about shortcut keys to pop up and pop down tooltips that Gaim doesn't impliment. --Tim Ringenbach |
From: Gary K. <gr...@re...> - 2004-03-14 07:42:53
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for anyone to lazy to dig through the plugin tracker.. here it is.. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=884444&group_id=235&atid=300235 i don't remember what version it was diff'd against.. probably 0.76cvs but it was a while ago... Gary |
From: Vince <lo...@in...> - 2004-03-14 07:49:39
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On Sun, Mar 14, 2004 at 01:14:29AM -0600, Tim Ringenbach wrote: > I just thought I'd point out that while some of Gaim's tooltips fall > into the learning aid catagory, the main one that people talk about is > the one for buddies in the buddy list, which is an informational > tooltip. It's not the sort of thing you turn off to take off the > training wheels. And for those who use it, a large delay would be annoying. Yep. That's why the delay would be a preference, defaulting to whatever the current delay is. A common idiom is to let users set a 0 ms delay if they want to disable tooltips, though I'm not suggesting that. I'm aware that the buddy list tooltip is the main subject, and was basically suggesting that a configurable delay might be sufficient for the purposes of those people running Gaim over high-latency remote desktops... it seems a reasonable compromise. If the problem is that the tooltip pops up too frequently (causing ugly redraws through round-trip delays), then setting a higher tooltip delay may alleviate the problem, whilst still making sure the information is available if you really want it. That way the tooltip delay is adjustable to the latency of your connection, or to taste. > Any patch adding a new preference is probably going to break the string > freeze, btw. So even if you were to talk KingAnt and SeanEgan into it, > it wouldn't happen in 0.76. Not if it's a hidden preference. Preference keynames don't get translated, surely? :) You can always put the UI in later, anyway. Vince -- Vincent Ho loki /at/ internode.on.net Every complex problem is a simple hierarchy of simple problems. |
From: Todd V. <tv...@du...> - 2004-03-14 17:25:25
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On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Tim Ringenbach wrote: : I just thought I'd point out that while some of Gaim's tooltips fall : into the learning aid catagory, the main one that people talk about is : the one for buddies in the buddy list, Which is my main annoyance, though by no means the only one. The suggestion earlier about a delay setting is a useful restatement of the option, and would be just as welcome to me as a disabling option. : Any patch adding a new preference is probably going to break the string : freeze, btw. So even if you were to talk KingAnt and SeanEgan into it, : it wouldn't happen in 0.76. Of course not. 0.76's release is eagerly awaited at work, as some of the folks use Yahoo's network often. :-P -- -- Todd Vierling <tv...@du...> <tv...@po...> |
From: Gregory F. M. <ma...@gf...> - 2004-02-20 21:42:52
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On Feb 20, 2004, Daniel Atallah <DAt...@le...> wrote: |> On Feb 17, 2004, "Gregory F. March" <ma...@gf...> wrote: |> When I'm forced to run windows, I try to make it act as close as I can |> to X windows. I set windows to have focus-follows-mouse. | |I suspect that this (focus-follows-mouse) serves to make the problem worse. |I occasionally notice tooltips that don't go away, but it is barely |noticeable let alone a major problem. Yes, I'm sure it makes it worse - Windoze just wasn't build to handle that model well. But for me, f-f-m is critical - I just can't get work done efficiently when I can only type only in the window that is in the foreground. Alas... /greg -- Gregory F. March -=- http://www.gfm.net:81/~march -=- AIM:GfmNet |
From: Gregory F. M. <ma...@gf...> - 2004-03-11 20:40:45
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On Feb 20, 2004, Daniel Atallah <DAt...@le...> wrote: |> On Feb 17, 2004, "Gregory F. March" <ma...@gf...> wrote: |> When I'm forced to run windows, I try to make it act as close as I can |> to X windows. I set windows to have focus-follows-mouse. | |I suspect that this (focus-follows-mouse) serves to make the problem worse. |I occasionally notice tooltips that don't go away, but it is barely |noticeable let alone a major problem. ...and the GTK+ guys refuse to look at it too. :-( /greg -- Gregory F. March -=- http://www.gfm.net:81/~march -=- AIM:GfmNet |