Re: GUI design

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Mar-2012, Michael Goffioul wrote:

| On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 8:59 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
| > The Octave IDE will be used by novices.  It is NOT the place for UI
| > innovation.  We should use GUI/IDE features that are proven, familiar,
| > and easy to work with.  We do not need dockable widgets.  The ability
| > to change the relative sizes of the command, workspace, and history
| > windows would be useful, but we do not need to be able to rearrange
| > their locations within the main window.  Tabbed interfaces will not be
| > used
| 
| I'm not going to argue forever about this, so I'll just explain my
| opinion once...
| 
| I'm not desperately pushing for dockable widgets, but from my
| experience I would definitely start with a flexible window arrangement
| system. This will define the overall framework for the entire IDE. If
| you don't get it right from the beginning, or go for the more
| straightforward solution of a static window arrangement, it'll be more
| difficult to move away from it later on. I think it's worth spending
| time on that from the start.
| 
| The problem I see with a more static layout is that users will most
| likely want to change it. Everybody has his own opinion about how
| window should be arranged, what's important, what should be always
| visible, what is never used... A generic dockable system[1] provides
| the flexibility to make everybody happy, as it's entirely under the
| control of the user.
| 
| Michael.
| 
| [1]: by this, I really mean a system where windows can be docked,
| popped out, split horizontally or vertically or merged into tabs.

I've looked at the current IDE and the dockable panels seem OK.  And
since they are already done, I don't see the point of removing them.

However, it seems to me that this is primarily a feature for
experienced users, and that novices will accidentally rearrange the
layout and find themselves confused.  Also, since changes to the
layout seem to be persistent, restarting Octave will not restore the
system to a safe and known state.  I think that sort of thing is
likely to cause frustration for new users.  So can we disable dockable
widgets by default?  Is there a way we could provide a menu item so
that the dockable widgets are locked in place by default?

jwe