Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] patches to add interface descriptions

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From: Nathan Jennings <njen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 10:36:02 -0400
Graham Bloice wrote:
On a UI note:

1.  The list boxes in the Interface Options dialog seem too shallow to me.
When an horizontal scroll bar is displayed, the list box isn't tall enough
to display even a single row of text completely.  I would suggest that the
list boxes be sized to display 2 and a fraction rows.

OK, maybe even more in the "Edit interface options" interface list. On *nix with a loopback and Linux with "any", users will have at least three interfaces. I'll work on defaulting it to 3 rows (including a scrollbar :o)).

2.  It's not entirely obvious to me when changes take effect.  To see the
effect of changes, one has to dismiss the dialog, and redisplay it again.
Could the change of selected entry in the interface list be used to update
the top list?

I thought this might be confusing... I tried to pick a wording for the frame text, "Previously saved options", that would indicate it wouldn't change as you modified the options below it. In other words, I intended this table to be only a summary of the options you had already saved. By having this summary, you wouldn't have to click on each interface to view/remember what options you had saved. (This is especially nice if you have a lot of interfaces in a machine.)

Using "saved" in the frame text isn't really correct either, because it's only saved if you select OK and then click "Save" in the capture preferences dialog.

Any suggestions for wording to make it more clear? Like maybe "Current options (will not update while editing below)"? :o)

3.  On Win32, get_interface_list() already adds an interface description
that describes the NIC type.  Should the user entered description replace
that text rather than adding to it when displaying the interface list in the
capture dialog?

This was briefly discussed awhile back and decided that if you had your own description defined, the OS description (NIC brand/model?) probably wasn't needed.

Thanks for testing and commenting.

-Nathan