pre-2.0 charset disambig. string review ui mockup

Josh Sled jsled at asynchronous.org
Sat Apr 1 09:51:15 EST 2006


As per discussion on #gnucash yesterday regarding the file-encoding
disambiguation UI, I thought it might be useful to mockup the druid I
was thinking about as we were talking.  Feedback from Derek of a draft
version, in-channel, spawned a couple of variations...

  http://asynchronous.org/tmp/encoding-ui.html

I'm concerned about the tedium of clicking through a lot of "Forward"s
to deal with strings one at a time, so I'm assuming a batch/list
interaction.  If -- as we hope -- the vast majority of the strings need
only a quick visual confirmation of correctness, then we should present
them all at once to be, well, quickly confirmed.   Also, entertaining
the notion of being able to change the "default" or presumed coding, the
user should be able to quickly see the effect of making that change, and
thus should have some/many cases in front of them.

As such, I think the druid can become a single dialog: at the top is the
default/presumed value, with a default selection based on the locale,
but modifiable by a knowledgeable user.  A the bottom is the table of
strings for review and/or fixup.  The "progress bar" becomes the scroll
bar through the table, and a single "Ok" at the end affects the changes.

In any case, "two" and "three" are variations that have a more direct
interaction between the user and the string.... in "two", without
exposing the charset at all (the user just picks the correct string) and
"three" being a hybrid.  In "one" and "three", the expectation is that
changing the coding at the top of the dialog would affect all
non-user-modified values.


[Note that while the string "Expenses" used here is in every row, this
is only for mockup-creation copy-and-paste convenience; as per
discussion today, only unique (sub-)strings would appear for review.  
Also, as Derek points out, in (probably) all the charsets we care about,
ASCII is coded the same ... so we should be able to handle pure-ASCII
strings trivially.  As such, "Expenses" isn't a good example, but it's
just a mockup ... imagine some other strings instead. :)]

FWIW, "three" is my favorite: simple, single-screen, direct-selection
but still is explicit about the charset used.

-- 
...jsled
http://asynchronous.org/ - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}`


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