Subject: policy -- keep screen shots current
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Aug 22 2001 - 17:58:30 CDT
[ Whoops! I left this one out of yesterday's barrage. ]
Another strength of our XP efforts is that we've managed to create a user
interface that looks strikingly similar on each platform, while still
honoring any relevant platform-specific GUI conventions.
This means that users on any single platform get a totally native look and
feel, but if they wind up switching to a different platform, AbiWord will
still look *very* familiar. In many places, this is a direct result of our
emphasis of implementing as much functionality as practical in XP code, but
in the case of dialogs, it's just plain hard work.
One policy that helps reduce the amount of work needed is to *ensure* that
all checkins of user-visible changes to the UI also include the
corresponding screen shots:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/November/0119.html
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/November/0143.html
In short, it's *much* easier to make each of the platform-specific
implementations look similar if we each take the effort to show off what our
own platform looks like!
For more information on the abi/shots directory, see:
http://www.abisource.com/lxr/source/abi/shots/README.TXT
If people are willing to take the little bit of extra effort to do a screen
grab to show off their work as soon as they're done with it, then we'll
always have a complete browseable copy of the current UI for all our
platforms. [1]
Any objections?
Paul
[1] When I put my evangelist hat on, this same content seems like it could
be put to *really* good use on our website:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/February/0247.html
Even small steps like this could do a *lot* to make the site more
user-friendly.
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