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Re: Re: Suggestion: Improving language

From: Simon Large <simon.tortoisesvn_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2010 11:44:50 +0000

On 8 December 2010 10:46, David Balažic <david.balazic_at_comtrade.com> wrote:
>>> Why not "SWITCH to Branch/Tag"?  "RELOCATE working copy" couldn't hurt.
>>>  My point is, these menu choices and dialog boxes are so terse that they hardly
>>> help guide new/infrequent users.  It's a "click-until-I-recognize-something" interface.
>>>  Thankfully, the dialog boxes have a Help button that opens the manual.
>
>> Visually those ALL CAPS do hurt, at least to me.
>
> Then the svn words can be marked so other way.
>
> I was thinking adding an explanatory tooltip to menu items, but
> it seems Windows does not support that (?).
>
> Additional words in the menu text are another option, leaving the standard
> SVN command name there, marked as such (by caps, bold, italics,
> color or otherwise).

I don't think Windows supports bold/italic/underline/colour in context
menu items. Bold already means the default action on double-click.

> Or each menu item pops up a dialog, which has a short explanation.
> Most actions already lead to a dialog, so this is not a big UI change.
> The dialogos that just explain what will be done can have a "don't show
> this in the future, just do the action" checkbox.

Bear in mind that in the 5 years that I have been watching this list
this is one of a very small number of people not understanding what
the standard SVN terms mean, and the first that I can recall where
this sort of change has been suggested. I would be very much against
adding more intermediate dialogs, even if there is a "don't show this
again" checkbox - somewhere you have to have a way of re-enabling
those dialogs again and it gets very messy.

If it is worth doing anything at all the best I can come up with is a
Quick Help menu entry which brings up a dialog listing the context
menu commands and a brief description of what they do, possibly with a
link to the relevant section in the helpfile from each one. That at
least would not get in the way of the vast majority of users who do
know what the terms mean.

But where do you stop? Most of the dialogs have context menus as well,
and context menus are by nature quite terse. The same could be said of
any program like Word or Excel. Some terms are obvious, but in many
cases you just have to learn what the tool does.

Simon

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Received on 2010-12-08 12:44:59 CET

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