GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 141772
Plug-in dialogs need to be reviewed for HIG compliance
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
As part of GIMP's continuing efforts towards HIG compliance, Sven has asked that volunteer developers inspect each plug-in for HIG compliance. Each plug-in dialog needs to be reviewed. Sven suggests the following: * Unneeded frames such as those saying "Parameter Settings" or "Preview" should probably simply be removed. * Frames that do actually group controls should be changed to use the new GimpFrame widget. * Separators should be replaced by empty space. * The spacing of the main vbox needs to be changed to 12 pixels to clearly separate groups of controls. * The dialog border width should also be 12 pixels. So that we can better track the progress of this task, please file a separate bug for each plug-in with a dialog that needs changing, and make this bug depend on it. Also, please note any plug-in that has a dialog that does not need changing (if there are any) in the comments, so that we do not duplicate labor. A sample bug report for a randomly selected plug-in (sobel) is provided as the first dependency.
This is going to be a lot of work since (almost) everything plug-in has to be changed, but it isn't difficult. Would be nice if we had a few volunteers that could work on this one to get familiar with GIMP. I have set the milestone to 2.2 because doing this job halfways wouldn't make sense. Once we start it, we should finish it before the next release. Would also be nice if someone with a usability perspective (maybe Ellen Reitmayr?) could take a look at the several plug-ins. I'm sure that with a view minor changes in the dialogs things could be improved a lot. At least we need consistency across plug-ins. When we start changing the plug-ins it would also be the right moment to look at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=123699 (Follow HIG Capitalization style) to avoid editing the same code twice.
IMO it's better to edit the same code twice and do one change at a time.
Please see my comment on bug #141773 and do _not_ file bug reports for each and every plug-in.
Normally I would prefer different changes to happen seperately. In this case however the changes are almost completely trivial and they both have to do with the user interface. I agree that having 100+ bug reports doesn't make sense. Is there an easier way to track progress and make sure that we aren't overlooking plug-ins?
Perhaps if we had another database listing all the plug-ins and their current status, we could use that. Of course, it would boil down to exactly the same thing. The problem is that missing even one plug-in makes us look unprofessional. Consistancy counts.
Two possible solutions: asign this task to someone and let him/her very carefully check all the plug-in dialogs before release 2.2. Or file bugreports, as you already proposed, but instead of filing a bug report for each plug-in file a report for groups of plug-ins (Blur, Colors, etc.) so we have about 10 reports.
Applied to HEAD: 2004-05-08 Henrik Brix Andersen <brix@gimp.org> * plug-ins/common/screenshot.c (shoot_dialog): HIGify the screenshot plug-in. Fixes part of bug #141772.
for greater consistancy it might be a good idea to have a reset button in all/most plugins, preferably using the layout like Script-Fu at the bottom before the Cancel, OK buttons.
Reset button is planned. It will come with the PDB redesign. The new PDB is supposed to provide default values. That will make it trivial to have a Reset button (as well as allowing to change the defaults and storing/retrieving settings by name). We should get this done for GIMP-2.4.
As an interim status report, I'd like to let you know that about half of the plug-ins have been HIG-ified so far. This includes plug-ins/common/[a-o]*.c plus all plug-ins that use GimpOldPreview. More to come ...
We are almost there. Here's a list of remaining plug-ins: plugindetails (needs a major GUI review not just some HIG-ification) dbbrowser (I suggest we add a GimpProcedureView widget to gimpui that can be used from other plug-ins such as GAP) gimppressionist rcm (halfway done) imagemap (Maurits is doing this one) maze pagecurl print (supposed to be replaced?!) script-fu (Brix is doing this one) py-gimp (no idea what needs to be done; I am not going to touch it) winsnap (needs to be ported to GimpDialog; not going to touch it) I expect to finish HIG-ification for gimpressionist, rcm, maze and pagecurl this weekend, perhaps later today.
> print (supposed to be replaced?!) According to bug #127957 gimp-print-5.0 will not be ready for release at the time we expect to release gimp-2.2. As I have understood it, gimp-print is not even in API freeze yet. I suggest we HIGify the print plug-in to be on the safe side (and to get consistency) - and wait and see when gimp-print-5.0 will be released.
I think I HIG-ified them all now except Imagemap (Maurits is not yet finished with this one) and Script-Fu (this is left for Brix). This doesn't mean that there isn't room for improvement or that I claim that all dialogs are strictly HIG-conformant right now. But the user interface is certainly a lot more consistent now and IMHO it also looks more pleasant.
2004-05-25 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> Sorry, couldn't resist to finish this task... * plug-ins/script-fu/script-fu-console.c * plug-ins/script-fu/script-fu-scripts.c * plug-ins/script-fu/script-fu-server.c: HIG-ified. Maurits, please close this report as soon as you have finished HIG-ification of the ImageMap plug-in (or let me know if you want me to do it).
Maurits, what's happening with Imagemap? It's the only remaining plug-in and four weeks have gone by...
Sorry, I was extremely busy last month(s). Will have a look at Imagemap this week.
I've opened a new bug report for the Imagemap plug-in (bug #15004) so we can finally close this one as FIXED.