On 3/22/13 10:09 AM, Katie Cunningham wrote:
You'd be surprised re: designers and UX. There's quite a few in the
Python community, but many assume that they have nothing to give to
core. I'd love to pull some of them in!
OK, seems like a worthy goal.
This question is motivated by genuine curiosity: what do UX specialists
do, exactly? What are their skill sets? Do they code, do they prototype
stuff in Photoshop, etc? What can they contribute to Python development?
My experience with UX specialists/designer is limited to using
open-source icon sets in my apps, so I don't know much about the work UX
specialists do, and would like to learn more.
As for IDLE, some of my problems stem from having a shell-like
environment that doesn't act like a shell. Up arrow moves my cursor? I
get history through clicking? Why does the Python shell have dots to
indicate a block, but IDLE doesn't? Also, parts of the interface don't
seem to scale well as you change the font size.
"Up arrow moves cursor": that's the expected behavior of the Tk text
widget on which IDLE is based. I for one would find it very jarring to
see this behavior changed.
I think we need to step away from a few people that say 'it works for
me' and ask 'how can we make it work for the community?'
Before we can do that, however, we need to agree on what the problems
are. You consider the behavior of the up arrow in IDLE a bug; I consider
it a feature.
Another logistical problem to be aware of: if IDLE is to be kept in the
core, then any revisions to it must be based on its current UI toolkit,
Tkinter. IDLE inherits a lot of Tkinter's default behaviors. Changing
IDLE's GUI library would be an entirely different conversation (one that
crops up annually on c.l.py, it seems). If you move IDLE outside the
core or fork it, then you have a lot more freedom to experiment.
Of course, my own preferences may not be representative of everyone's,
and I'm certainly not going to have sour grapes if a consensus emerges
to overhaul IDLE in these directions. I always have Emacs to fall back
on. :-)
--Kevin
--
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
http://www.wtmobilesoftware.com
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