I'm currently trying to improve the usability of the gnome-system-tools package. Specifically, the way it interacts with PolicyKit with Unlock buttons. The relevant bug reports are:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=578578 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558976 If you open the Users and Groups tool, you get a dialog like this: http://www.ultra-premium.com/scratch/us1.png (for those unfamiliar, when you click "Unlock" you will be given a password prompt, and on getting the password right, all the things that were insensitive become sensitive, and the "Unlock" button becomes insensitive) Clicking on "Manage Groups" shows this (modal) dialog: http://www.ultra-premium.com/scratch/us2.png This looked fairly bad to me, since the only way to do anything useful here is to close this dialog, unlock the tool, and then go back. So I wrote a patch which adds an unlock button: http://www.ultra-premium.com/scratch/us3.png It will probably find its way into the master branch soon, once I stop sucking at writing patches :) I'd like to do a similar thing for the user properties dialog. It has 3 tabs which look like this in their locked state: http://www.ultra-premium.com/scratch/us4.png http://www.ultra-premium.com/scratch/us5.png http://www.ultra-premium.com/scratch/us6.png I'm wanting to put an Unlock button on the left of the Cancel button. Is it ok to do this, even though it doesn't apply at all to the first tab ("Account") - since nothing on that tab becomes sensitive as a result of unlocking. The next one: http://www.ultra-premium.com/scratch/ss1.png I'm thinking that making the checkboxes look disabled is the correct solution, since it isn't expected that toggling a checkbox causes a password dialog to pop up. Does this seem reasonable? Finally, would it make sense to have a standard way of drawing a widget that means "This widget will cause a password prompt to pop up if it is activated"? So we could then get rid of Unlock buttons completely, but also communicate to people what will happen when they activate a control. Feedback here, or in bug reports is appreciated. Andy _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
