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The new About dialog is much better than the previous one. I feel that it could still be improved. Here are my suggestions: (*) When the user presses Help->About, a dialog opens. Then the user has to press "Installation Details", which opens up another dialog. I'm not a big fan of 'dialog over dialog over dialog ...' situation, as its little irritating when you have to press Close/OK several times to get back to the original window. Can't we have the second dialog itself in the original dialog, something with "Details >>" button? (*) In the Plug-ins tab 'Columns' should be 'Columns...' or 'Configure Columns...'? (*) 'Show Signing Info' is better to have as a checkbox rather than a push button? (*) The order of the tabs are now thru the digits prefixed in their ids. Why can't we have an optional attribute called order in the extension point itself? (*) When the configuration tab is loading, there is no indication in the UI. It was frozen for 2/3 seconds. How about wrapping the ConfigurationInfo.getSystemSummary() inside a BusyIndicator.showWhile()?
Thanks for the comments. My responses are geared around "fix the regressions, worry about the rest later" as I don't have the cycles to go much farther with "About" than just getting the extensibility in. (In reply to comment #0) > The new About dialog is much better than the previous one. I feel that it could > still be improved. Here are my suggestions: > > (*) When the user presses Help->About, a dialog opens. Then the user has to > press "Installation Details", which opens up another dialog. I'm not a big fan > of 'dialog over dialog over dialog ...' situation, as its little irritating > when you have to press Close/OK several times to get back to the original > window. Can't we have the second dialog itself in the original dialog, > something with "Details >>" button? I'm not a big fan either, but we actually tried integrating the first dialog with second (as a page, not a details), and it did not play well. See bug 246875 comment 33.) Having a details pane would explode about into quite a large dialog, so I'm not sure that's any better (and still requires a click). Some sizing issues, too: - we don't know the size of the product's branding images and how this would play in different configurations. - we wouldn't want to deal with remembering exploded state or adjusting the size of the branded dialog to deal with the user's preferred size in working with the detailed dialog - we *do* want to remember the size of the details dialog So we decided to keep the first dialog small/light. We looked at a lot of other about dialogs (Firefox, various Mac apps, Microsoft suite, etc.) and most apps tend to use the "auxiliary button" also. > > (*) In the Plug-ins tab 'Columns' should be 'Columns...' or 'Configure > Columns...'? Yep, that's a regression. Should be Columns... > > (*) 'Show Signing Info' is better to have as a checkbox rather than a push > button? Can you open a separate bug? This is not a regression and unlikely to change in the short term, but I agree it could be done better. > > (*) The order of the tabs are now thru the digits prefixed in their ids. Why > can't we have an optional attribute called order in the extension point itself? I followed the lead of the systemSummary extension point, which has done it this way for some time. I agree it's a hack, but since plug-ins will tend to contribute to both of these extension points, I thought it better to treat it the same. Note it's not really an "advertised" scheme, it's just our way of getting the platform contributions in the preferred order. > > (*) When the configuration tab is loading, there is no indication in the UI. It > was frozen for 2/3 seconds. How about wrapping the > ConfigurationInfo.getSystemSummary() inside a BusyIndicator.showWhile()? > Agree something should be done here. In the old code, the wait occurred before the dialog opened, now that we have a page scheme, we need to handle this better.
These items fixed in HEAD >20090223: - Columns label is back to Columns... - hourglass while reading system summary info won't fix (for now) - combine installation details with main about dialog - make the order of the pages more explicit - checkbox for signing info Can you please open a separate bug for signing info. Also if you don't like my reasoning for the hack of the page id's matching the hack in system summary extensions, could you open a bug for that also? (I suggest that both extension points should act the same, so whatever you propose for the installation pages should probably be done for system summary). thanks again for looking over this.
Bug # 265916 opened for the Signing info and Bug#265917 opened for the priority attribute
verified on WinXP, I20090310-0100 - Columns... - hourglass
