Created attachment 77921 [details] [review]
patch

It would be helpfull if you specified which dialogs were effected and fixed by your patch.

I agree, this is a big patch and it would take some time to go through and figure out what has changed.

Also, We do try to keep Gossip as HIG compliant as possible, so I would like to know what/where you are changing the UI before we consider applying it since there may be some special cases where we don't abide by the HIG.

I looked a bit at this the other day. The patch basically does what the bug report says, i.e. fixes spacing, padding, accelecators and capitalization... For the spacing/padding art, for example, it gets rid of the old style way to add padding (using 4 spaces) and uses the new features in gtkalignment instead. It also fixes allmost all the dialogs to get the exact right paddings instead of just about the right ones (make sure the border padding for gtkdialogs add up to 12 instead of just setting the padding to 12 (which makes the resulting padding more than 12).

It looks good to me, I will try to take a look tonight to see if it still applies.

Hopefully the big main.glade file has not changed too much to conflict (we should really split it up so it doesn't happen so easily).

Yes, I changed only the spacings, capitalisation, accelerators and alignments where necessary; in all concerned dialogues (just about any GtkDialog in any glade file). I didn't change any other strings or the UI appearance beyond the spacings and label alignments.

I realise that glade file diffs are hard to read...

Created attachment 78140 [details] [review]
updated patch to cvs HEAD

There were a few conflicts in cvs; this patch should apply cleanly to HEAD.

> The dialogues have some HIG problems:
> - wrong spacings and paddings
> - missing accelerators
> - wrong label capitalisations used
> 
> Attached patch should fix most of these problems.

Richard: forgive me, but that sounds like exactly what the HIG patch should do, but it doesn't tell me which dialogs or windows and exactly which spacings and paddings? I am quite interested in where I/we have been going wrong with regards to designing the interface.

chpe: Thanks for both patches. I have tried it out and it looks good. I even refreshed a little by reading up on the HIG some more. Something I have to question though is the spacing between the dialog/window buttons and other controls.  

For an alert (all dialogs?) it should be 24 (which I don't think it was or is with your patch) as detailed here:

  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/windows-alert.html#alert-spacing

For windows, it isn't too clear to me, but I think it should be 18 shouldn't it? According to this page:

  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/design-window.html#improved-layout-figure

Which says: "For vertical spacing between groups of components, 18 pixels is adequate."

Am I wrong? 

Other than that, it looks good to me and I will try it out some more this week, thanks.

Alert dialogues should have 24px, yes. (So you set the spacing of the dialogue's vbox to 14px which adds up to 24px with the 5px of the action area border and the 5px of the main content's border).

Normal dialogues need only 12px (spacing=2px); but you're right that this doesn't seem to be explicitly mentioned in the HIG... It has been applied to many dialogues in GNOME (_not_ just in bugs filed by myself :) and to the Gtk+ builtin dialogues themselves (bug 163850).
Dennis, do you know if there's a canonical source to quote for this?

Primary windows (the main chat window, etc) don't need 12px border, btw.

Unfortunately, the details are not explicitly mentioned in the HIG.  If I remember correctly the authors did not wish to include implementation details, because the specifics may change in future version of GTK+ or GNOME.  But, it would be nice to have it documented somewhere such as the GNOME Wiki.

I have been using this a while, and it looks good to me, thanks for the patch