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Re: How uniform can GUI clients be?

From: Mark Murphy <mmurphy_at_collab.net>
Date: 2001-01-31 14:20:09 CET

> >While we may depict a folder/directory
> >differently, the context menu operations to be
> >performed on one should be fairly consistent
> >(i.e., add, remove, update all, commit all, ...
>
> I'd say leave out commands like "update ALL"
> and "commit ALL". The idea generally should
> be: select an object and then specify the
> operation you want to do with it. An object
> here can be a folder or a file or so.

The only reason for having "foo" and "foo ALL" as separate operations is
if they have actual different meanings. For example, if performing an
operation on a folder means something different than performing an
operation on a folder and its contents.

> Well, what would be a GUI operation for "merge from
> branch rel-1-0-1-fixes"? This could be mapped to
> drag and drop in a branch and revision history
> tree view. Good. And a diff between rel-1-0-1-fixes
> and rel-1-1-a16 of a few files? I'd say, that selecting
> the files and then picking the diff command from the
> SVN menu is not too strange a thing. After that you
> can view the diff of each file by double clicking
> the files' entries in the sand box view.

I'm not familiar with version tree views, so I don't know how we'd do it
there. In a file/folder view, when you select a file, I can see a diff
menu option off the file object's context menu.

> I might be missing a lot here. But one thing is: people
> will only feel "comfortable" with SVN (or any other
> complex system) if they can figure out what's going
> on. They have to understand what it does and they
> have to understand notions of tag, branch, revision
> history, etc. And they have to understand what operations
> they can perform and what those operations will do
> for them. In a system like SVN, we mustn't expect
> the GUI to teach the user? Isn't there going on too
> much that is not immediately *visible*. In this respect,
> SVN is very different from, say Photoshop, where
> you immediately see on screen what you do or did.
>
> So, what's so bad about having these operations as
> commands in menus?

I think most "commands" need to be operations against objects, vs.
standalone commands. In other words, as much on context menus as
possible vs. window menus.

Mark Murphy
mmurphy@collab.net
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:20 2006

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