Hi,
There are several parts to this.
First is the implementation of the dialog. The code was such a mess and
so confusing that when I wanted to update the Cocoa preferences I
decided to start pretty much from scratch. My feeling is that the
preferences dialogs (and I am not just talking Cocoa here) have never
really been implemented properly and developers have preferred taking
short cuts via the preferences file rather than attacking the real
issue. How often have we had o give users the advice 'Set
suchandsuch="whatever" in the _custom_ section of AbiWord.profile'? Far
too often.
The nature of preference schemes: we clearly have some support for
them, but how well do they work? Does anyone use them? Do we still want
them?
Is there a way to revert to application defaults without having to
delete AbiWord.profile? For that matter, what *are* the defaults? We
developers know the answer, but do the users? Should they?
And on all platforms there are preferences that can't be set through
the dialog, and others that have buttons but don't really exist (yet or
any longer). Of course, preferences will naturally change with time,
but we should try to make at easy as possible to keep the preferences
dialog up to date.
Something that I want to enable is to allow plugins and exporters to
add sections to the preferences dialog (or its helper classes). The
HTML export options dialog seemed like a good idea at the time but most
of the time it's a nuisance and these options (and, generally speaking,
any simple options) could be added relatively easily to a dynamically
generated section of the preferences dialog.
Finally, the Abiword.profile file format really needs to be more
flexible. Having all the values as attributes verges on the insane and
I would like to develop a better format (still XML, of course).
Regards, Frank
Received on Sun Jan 9 01:31:09 2005
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