[Bluez-devel] bluez-gnome ui

[Bluez-devel] bluez-gnome ui

[Teppo Turtiainen]

Hi guys,

Let me start by saying that I'm a big fan of Bluetooth (6 devices and
counting) and of the work you are doing.

I am not a user interface designer, but I think that the current UI for
bluez-gnome is pretty awful: There is a Services tab that only geeks
will understand (what actually is a Serial service?), there are buttons
that appear/disapper and change contents depending on which bonded
device is selected, there are non-obvious icons (what does that lock
next to my phone mean? Is my phone locked?), there is no way to initiate
pairing with a new device, for some reason it is necessary to ask the
user for the class of the device when HAL already knows that, etc. I
tried filing bugs for some of the individual issues, but those got
wontfixed, so I thought I'd email the list directly. 

I think the current crappiness is even more evident when compared to the
brilliant design for BluetoothManager that was up at live.gnome.org. [1]
Is there any chance of working towards the more non-geek-friendly vision
presented on that old BluetoothManager page?

Thanks,
Teppo

[1] http://live.gnome.org/BluetoothManager?action=recall&rev=16



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Re: [Bluez-devel] bluez-gnome ui

[Bastien Nocera]

On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 21:02 +0200, Teppo Turtiainen wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Let me start by saying that I'm a big fan of Bluetooth (6 devices and
> counting) and of the work you are doing.
> 
> I am not a user interface designer, but I think that the current UI for
> bluez-gnome is pretty awful: There is a Services tab that only geeks
> will understand (what actually is a Serial service?), there are buttons
> that appear/disapper and change contents depending on which bonded
> device is selected, there are non-obvious icons (what does that lock
> next to my phone mean? Is my phone locked?), there is no way to initiate
> pairing with a new device, for some reason it is necessary to ask the
> user for the class of the device when HAL already knows that, etc. I
> tried filing bugs for some of the individual issues, but those got
> wontfixed, so I thought I'd email the list directly. 

I marked it as WONTFIX, because I'm not the maintainer. I think the UI
is pretty rubbish as well, but it works, which is more than can be said
of the previous attempts...

> I think the current crappiness is even more evident when compared to the
> brilliant design for BluetoothManager that was up at live.gnome.org. [1]
> Is there any chance of working towards the more non-geek-friendly vision
> presented on that old BluetoothManager page?

Well, I did that original mockup, so I think it's good as well ;)

> [1] http://live.gnome.org/BluetoothManager?action=recall&rev=16

Cheers


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Re: [Bluez-devel] bluez-gnome ui

[Marcel Holtmann]

Hi Teppo,

> I am not a user interface designer, but I think that the current UI for
> bluez-gnome is pretty awful: There is a Services tab that only geeks
> will understand (what actually is a Serial service?), there are buttons
> that appear/disapper and change contents depending on which bonded
> device is selected, there are non-obvious icons (what does that lock
> next to my phone mean? Is my phone locked?), there is no way to initiate
> pairing with a new device, for some reason it is necessary to ask the
> user for the class of the device when HAL already knows that, etc. I
> tried filing bugs for some of the individual issues, but those got
> wontfixed, so I thought I'd email the list directly. 

to be quite honest it is not that simple. I also never said that this is
a perfect UI, but it is a working one.

With the service tab, I fully agree. It was written from a full
technical background in mind and stuff like that should not be exposed
to the end user. However there are limitations to a certain degree and I
haven't seen any other proposal so far.

For the explanations of the icons. Write a patch that utilizes tooltip
to explain them.

In the class of device case, we actually do use HAL. However I wanna
have a way to not use HAL and set the class by myself. In case the "Use
HAL" checkbox is clicked we could go ahead and hide the class selection.
However that is not as simple as it sounds. You would have to hide the
box for all adapters. Remember this UI supports seamlessly multiple
adapters.

> I think the current crappiness is even more evident when compared to the
> brilliant design for BluetoothManager that was up at live.gnome.org. [1]
> Is there any chance of working towards the more non-geek-friendly vision
> presented on that old BluetoothManager page?

The answer to these kind of comments/questions is always the same. Send
in patches that will improve it.

Regards

Marcel



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