Re: [Pan-users] [.97] Some usability issues

[Jeff Berman]

Hi Charles,

Charles Kerr <address@hidden> wrote:

> (1) I don't really want to do per-group sort orders unless
there's
> an overwhelming clamor for them, but 0.98 has a persistent,
> global sort order.

That works!

>> 2) It might be me, but the direction of the sort direction
> arrow seems to be backwards.
>
> Hm.  Right now when A is at the top and Z is at the bottom, the
> arrow points down, which makes sense to me and is how other
> news and mail apps do it.

Really?  Maybe this is a Linux thing, because in both Windows and
the Mac OS the arrow points up when A is at the top.  I guess if
you think of the arrow as a triangle then the current way makes
sense:  the smallest value is at the top and the largest value at
the bottom, but as my brain has been trained with Windows/Mac OS it
seems counter-intuitive to me and I keep clicking it the wrong way.

> (6) Messing with the colors causes all kinds of headaches for
people
> using different system colors, so 0.9x is following the trend
> (such as in Thunderbird) of boldfacing unread articles and
> underlining read articles that have hidden unread children.

Strange, on my system unread articles aren't boldfaced; they look
identical to read articles except for the color change of the icon.
 I'm using Mac OS X 10.4.6 with GTK 2.4.9 installed via Fink.  I do
see the underlines, however.

>> 7) When loading headers in, pan now periodically refreshes the
>> header pane.  I can see how some might prefer this, but it can
>> also be disturbing. 
>
> If there's some specific point about it that's disturbing, maybe
> that should be addressed instead of making a preference.  What
> bothers you about it?

Well, maybe it's just unfamiliarity with the new pan, but I have a
hard time determining at a glance when a group is 100% loaded. 
Maybe there are two issues at play, but 0.14.2 had two indications
that a group was still loading:  it showed "New x of y" in the
status field at the bottom of the window, and it left the header
pane empty until everything was loaded in.  Pan .97 doesn't show in
advance the total number of articles it's attempting to read in (so
you never know when it will finish), plus it populates the header
pane as new headers are loaded.  I personally prefer to hold off
reading a group until headers are completely loaded, to avoid
having to make more than one pass through the posts.  So when I
referred to that as "disturbing", I meant that it caught me by
surprise when I started scrolling through a binaries newsgroup
looking for stuff to download, and then all of a sudden the list
resorted with new items both above and below the stuff I had
already seen.  And then this happened every 10 seconds or so, and I
couldn't see what was going on behind the scenes because the
header-loading thread was the fourth task and wasn't represented in
the task status fields.  But like I said, maybe it's just
unfamiliarity on my part or maybe I use pan differently than some.
 
>> 8) In the header pane, it appears that the left/right arrow keys
>> will scroll the view horizontally.  For some reason, however, it
>> takes a few key presses before the scrolling starts.

I wasn't sure how to interpret your answer on this one; is this how
GTK normally functions or would you like me to write up a bug on
this?

Thanks Charles!  I'll write up bugzilla tickets for the others.

Jeff

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