Re: [Ayatana] What do app authors do for Account Dialogs?

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx wrote on 08/10/10 09:48:
>...
> On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 02:37, Jorge O. Castro <jorge@xxxxxxxxxx
>...
>> I have an upstream working on an application, he wants to add an
>> account dialog to his application, this is what he came up with:
>> http://i.imgur.com/9vFZF.png
>>
>> So at first glance I thought "That doesn't look right". Here's
>> gwibber's account dialog: http://i.imgur.com/e504n.png
>>
>> Gwibber's is based on Empathy. Ken decided that it was important for
>> the Gwibber account manager to operate as a separate application
>> outside of Gwibber itself. While he was reimplementing it, he took the
>> opportunity to streamline it and change the design to make it more
>> consistent with the account dialog that Empathy had at the time.
>> (Because hey, why not, make them behave the same!)

Empathy's has improved a bit, partly influenced by a design I did for it
a year ago. <http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/AccountsAndSettings>

I still think it's an annoying problem for Empathy's "Accounts",
"Personal Information", and "Preferences" to be three separate windows.

>> Here's a separate design that Ryan had come up with (just to put it
>> out here): http://s3.amazonaws.com/scrnshots.com/screenshots/191324/gwibber-home-screenpng

That's probably giving it undue prominence.

>> From playing with both the empathy and gwibber dialogs they seem
>> similar enough for most people to not care -- though there are some
>> small inconsistencies that should be fixed. Evolution is different, as
>> well as other apps. Searching through the GNOME wiki and HIG doesn't
>> seem to give me any answers. Has anyone out there done research into
>> this topic? Is there supposed to be an example application where can I
>> point upstream application authors to emulate when it comes to adding
>> account information? Is anyone aware of GNOME handling what app
>> authors should do? I'd be more than happy to take the conversation
>> upstream if that's where it should be.

I haven't seen any Ubuntu application present accounts well yet. So I'd
rather see more experimentation, than projects agreeing on a
consistently bad design.

> Luke started a thread a while ago.. he addressed the User Accounts
> dialog, but this is a beautiful solution that can also work for many
> other types of account setup wizards etc..
> 
> On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 16:10, Allan Day <allanpday@xxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:allanpday@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>...
>> [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UserAccountDialog 
> 
> i think this is the most reasonable thing to look at for now, if one
> is looking for a good design to model an accounts dialog after..
>...

The main issue with that design (as I told its developers a couple of
years ago) is the excessive modality. There shouldn't need to be a
separate "Changing password for" dialog, or a separate "Restrictions"/
"Account Information" dialog.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAkyvFr0ACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecoBFQCfY+Q7CPRIip5tu3GDc/uw/4fm
e/gAoIxd61rrBnTEtY+oWrv/d/LtmjBs
=A9DA
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----