genesis-devs team mailing list archive

[Frederik Elwert <frederik.elwert@xxxxxx>]

Am Montag, den 16.11.2009, 23:54 +0100 schrieb David Castellanos: 
> > And regarding the sync_button: I think the menu should not contain radio
> > buttons, because this suggests that this is a setting, instead of
> > directly triggering an action. And I think the more human readable
> > strings from MS are favorable to my hackish "refresh-from-server"
> > strings.
> 
> Oks, I've changed the strings to something more readable. About the
> sync button, I prefer my option. From my point of view, the "sync"
> button has an associated action, which is to synchronize the selected
> account. The drop-down menu works as a modifier on this action,
> because there is a default option (two-way sync) and other non-default
> options. We can provide feedback about the selected sync button
> behaviour through the tooltip, and the selected element from the
> drop-down menu.

Hm, this really is kind of a tricky issue. I’m not really sure which
option is the best, I understand your concerns.

What I just thought is the following:

     1. Permanence. How long should the option affect the sync
        behaviour? I think this setting should not be permanent. If we
        would want to allow to change the sync mode permanently, this
        should go into the properties dialog. But if it isn’t permanent,
        how long is it affective? As long as the account manager window
        is open? 
     2. Scope. There are multiple accounts, but only one sync button. I
        think the sync button should only sync the currently selected
        account. But if I change the sync mode, should this also affect
        other accounts? So imagine account A is active, I choose
        "refresh-from-server" and click the sync button. After the sync,
        I select account B and click the button again. Does it still
        perform a "refresh-from-server" sync?

So just to make it clearly predictable what will happen, I’d make the
sync button always take the default action (the one specified in the
config, i.e., the one that syncevolution takes when called with no
additional options). If one wants a different sync mode, one would have
to select an action from the dropdown menu, and this mode would only be
used for that sync (like when calling syncevolution with the --sync
option).

So if we go with your option, which is ok, we should definitely use
different icons for the different sync modes, so it is perfectly clear
to the user which mode currently is active.

> If the menu contains actions instead of options, I rise to two
> questions. What should be the behavior of the synchronize button?,

The behaviour of the sync button would be de default action specified in
the config. Since Genesis provides no way to change that mode
permanently, this will always be two-way, unless someone changes this
using the command line.

> Should appear also the "two-way" action along the others in the
> drop-down menu?

Yes, I think it should, but I would not insist. ;-) It might be
redundant, but it doesn’t harm. And if one changes the sync mode in the
config, one still could perform a single two-way sync.

> Indeed we can provide feedback too through the button
> text and tooltip... I have to think more about it.

Yes, me too. This is a difficult issue, but we don’t have time pressure.
We could easily try one way, discuss it, maybe even release a beta, and
the decide which way to go.

> For now, I've pushed in launchpad an updated accounts_window.ui file
> with the changes you proposed (except the sync button one), and an
> updated account_properties.ui file with the weird last notebook page
> removed. The next weekend I'll try to finish it.

Great! Looking forwards to it!

Cheers,
Frederik