[ptx] Suggestion: Indicate Saved State

[Ippei UKAI]

On 2006-08-13, at 16:25, Steve Schacht wrote:

> It'd be nice if the saved state of the Hugin document were  
> indicated in a platform-native manner.  Under Mac OSX, there would  
> be a small dot in the window's close "widget" (the little glass  
> button in the upper left) to indicate that the document is dirty.   
> When the document is saved and the dirty flag cleared, the dot  
> disappears.

Hi Steve,

I know what you mean very well. On OSX, HuginOSX is a barely  
acceptable application in terms of user experience. This is mostly  
due to the fact hugin is a cross plat form application which displays  
all the user interfaces through an abstraction layer, which displays  
everything as native as possible on all Mac, Linux and Windows still  
letting us write only one set of codes. Although there are many parts  
written specific to each platforms, hugin will never able to have  
completely native Mac OS X looks-and-feel because of that  
restriction. (That is, by the way, not a restriction from developer's  
point of view as it made me far easier to bring hugin to OS X.)

Now, what we can do to the title bar. To be honest, it is very  
limited. All we can do is to change the title and change which boxes  
to enable (close, minimise, and resize/maximise). Maybe we could let  
the title to say "(Unsaved)" in the title bar, but that's furthest we  
can do I think.


However, personally I have two suggestions we can do easily from next  
release (after 0.6.1 as we are finishing it off).

1. Labels of button, menu, and other controls

There are published User Interface Guideline for all Windows, Mac OS  
X, and two major Linux environment; GNOME and KDE. There are many  
common standard among them that we miss. For example, having  
"..." (one letter on Mac by the way) in the end of items that open  
dialog to perform the action is fairly standard ("Open" for instance,  
should be "Open..."). Capitalisation is another example; most user  
interfaces should have first letter capitalised, and every word  
initial for many of them like mebus (with some exception like  
articles and conjunctions on Mac).

If we could at least vaguely follow those standards, the interface  
can look much neater that the mess now. Alternatively, we could even  
pick one, say Linux one to be fair, and modify it platform  
dependently for other platforms as required.


2. Shortcuts

I'm afraid this is rather platform dependent, but the same principle  
applies; let's follow the standards as much as possible. On Mac for  
example, use of "Cmd-P" is pretty much reserved for "Print", Redo has  
to be "Cmd-Shft-z", "Fnc-keys" should not usually be used for  
shortcuts and so on. Very annoying sometimes. We can also add some  
useful shortcut keys for, say 1-5 for the main 5 tabs.

Sorry for a big addition, but that's my though.

Ippei

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