RFC: refactoring window-register as widget-register + containing window

[Josh Sled]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2001 at 08:18:00PM -0800, Chris Lyttle wrote:

| My comments on this are purely from an end user point of view. As
| someone who is spending a lot of time looking at portions of the GnuCash
| interface (while doing docs) this seems like a good time to comment on
| some aspects of the UI. I would encourage you also to look at the GNOME
| 2.0 HIG http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/ and
| http://geocities.com/mpt_nz/ig2h.html

I want to be clear that I'm focusing here on a refactoring that should
change the UI [for the window-register] exactly none.

While these comments are quite good, and we should make an effort at
some point to respect the HIG, I think that change will necessarily come
later... and problably not driven by me.

| would be nice if we could either cut the size of the toolbar space used
| down and/or have a toolbar that only showed text for items where it's
| not clear what purpose they have. I have attached a file showing an

Tool tips are specified in the toolbar creation, and I believe are
specified for all toolbar elts.

This idea of having text labels next to some subset of the toolbar
icons strikes me as weird... who decides what toolbar elts have text
next to them?  And in GNC, I believe more often than not, our toolbar
icons will disambiguating labels next to them; the operations here are
"Schedule Transaction" and "Create new Account"... which are a bit harder
to represent iconically.

| expect to be the first one (Transaction) is the 4th. The menu's in
| general in GnuCash are fairly confusingly laid out, for example if I'm
[deletia]
| How about a menu layout like this;
[deletia]
| I could go into a lot more detail here, but I do think we need to
| rearrange the way we have the menu's laid out to make things easier to
| find from a users perspective.

I think this is mostly true; a think a full proposal, after some debate,
would be a good thing to implement... :)

| > Functionality Vector
| > --------------------
[deletia]
| > off is left visually in place, but set to be insensitive, and thus the
| > callbacks are not able to be invoked.  Probably the right thing, then, to do
| > is not attach the callbacks at all.
|
| This is good, having greyed out menu's indicates to the user they need
| to do something in order to make it work.

Well, unfortunately the user would likely be able to do nothing to make
the non-functional bits work... it would be things [like "Schedule"ing
a transaction w/in the SX Editor] that just don't make sense, but should
be there so the user isn't confused when they disappear from the menus.

...jsled