Bearfruit

OK, I’ve been trying to think of a way to report this problem for a while. Who does it go to, GNOME HIG, Ubuntu, Usability, Art team? I’ll probably send it to all of them but in order to simplify my explanation, this blog post exists.

In brief: GTK dialogs are way too big and they tend to waste a lot of screen space. To demonstrate my point I’m comparing the File Save dialog from Gedit and Windows XP Notepad. You’ll see that the Windows XP dialog is far smaller and yet communicates significantly more useful information. This is accomplished because it makes more efficient use of the screen space. It does this without being any less usable, and actually, because of it communicates more useful information can be more usable under some circumstances.

This image shows the two dialogs side by side. I’m using Virtual box’s seemless mode to show the two applications at the same resolution (1280x800, 96dpi) at the same time. In this view you can see that the Windows XP dialog communicates far more information - there is room for more files (14 files shown in XP, 9 in GNOME) and there are more data columns (XP includes the date, like GNOME, but also file type and size). Otherwise the dialogs are pretty similar as far as the capabilities.

But the Windows XP dialog is able to do this in about half the space (256k pixels vs 455k pixels). Here’s a picture showing the dimensions:

In the XP dialog there is no wasted space. Somehow they are able to use this space very efficiently without making the dialog crowded or feeling like parts of it are competing for your attention. The GTK dialog has massive amounts of wasted space. Huge expanses of just empty pixels, tons of padding around the file names in the list, and look at the gap between the end of the file name and the column where the date is shown.

I wish I could help fix this problem by actually coding, but I’ve looked at the code and frankly glib scares me.

If you have a comment for me or as a suggestion on the proper way to report this problem leave it below. Once I get a bug report I’ll paste a link to it and the best place to comment on the problem will be on the bug report.