[Zope-dev] New UI for 2.3

[Chris Withers]

Brian Lloyd wrote:
> 
> Are you guys working on 486's with 13in. monitors at 640x480 or
> something? :^)

Well, no, but laptops aren't known for their high resolutions and that
can make demonstrating zope a pain :-S

> Seriously - Zope has been criticized for a very long time for
> being, ah, aesthetically challenged :) It is a valid criticism
> - we have been (and quite honestly, will continue to be) more
> concerned with function over form. 

That's cool, but couldn't you hire someone just to make the thing look
nice? A graphic designer or usability expert who knows what's best for
all these things, rather than us, a load of developers, trying to guess
;-)

> But is it really so bad to
> make a 32 pixel-high concession to a small pittance of branding?

Yes... especially when you could get the same branding without wasting a
whole strip of the screen...

> I know that "branding" isn't important for those who are already
> believers, but Zope has grown enough that its reasonable to put
> some effort into "first impression factor". It doesn't help the
> community for reviews to come out that waste words on the
> visual appeal shortcomings of the UI and totally miss the
> point. A better first impression is a Good Thing.

I totally agree, and that top bar really spoils it :-S For example, in
Netscape, the bottom 5 pixels of the logo are chopped off when you first
open the manage screens.
In both IE and Netscape you get that horrible chunky frame border (is
there any way you can make that go away for the horizontal split?) which
wastes more space and looks nasty.

> The top frame is also a place where we might want to put more
> "placeless" operations like logout in the future. 

Any reason why that 'raise Unauthorized' thing couldn't have been put
in? I mean it's one line, and way more useful than "Sorry, this is not
yet implemented. " :-S

> You can only
> jam so much into the tree pane without it looking very much
> like way too much is being jammed into the tree pane :) 

Well, how about:
[Root Folder] (square brackets mean black background)
 <tree>
Refresh (having this below (c) Digital Creations makes no sense ;-)
[Logged in as X]
Logout
<other placeless operations>

Then put the Zope logo actually _in_ the manage tabs (in the dead space
to the left of the 'Contents' tab) and hey presto, no nead for a top
bar, still branded and looks nicer ;-)

> FWIW,
> one of the things we may put there later is a way to do "browser
> preferences" via cookies to control things like default text
> area sizes. 

This has always confused me, whats' wrong with just letting the user
object be a propertymanager?! After all, the preferences you're talking
about are user prefences and users will want them to follow them around,
no matter what machine they're using.
By implementing that, you remove the need for everyone else to resort to
LoginManager any time you want to store data that is associated with a
user in the user object...

Right, negative comments out the way, on the whole it looks very nice
and _much_ better than 2.2. Seems a lot quicker too. Really looking
forward to the full release :-)

cheers,

Chris

PS: You could always do a 'top bar' vote on www.zope.org and let
everyone have their say ;-)