Re: 2.4 feature list: preferences reworking

Hi Frank,

Do you plan to unify handling of measurement units as part of this work?
If so, i'd be offering my help to get that done throughout the UI
(gtk).

Thanks,
- Rob

Am Sonntag, den 09.01.2005, 00:29 +0000 schrieb Francis James Franklin:
> 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 Tue Jan 18 10:24:47 2005