Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Redesign of Context "Popup" menus, request for comments...

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From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 02:03:53 +0100
Hi List!

I've started to reorder/rearrange the popup menus in the three main panes and recently checked in my first proposal.

This proposal is meant as a "Request for Comments" as others *will* disagree about the decisions I've made, so we might find a concensus about it. Please don't get upset if your "favourite" item has moved/removed!

As a general guideline, I've tried to follow the guidelines of the "GNOME Human Interface Guide" about popup menus, see: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/menus-types.html#menu-type-popup


To qoute the GNOME HIG: "Popup menus provide shortcuts to those menu items that are applicable only to the currently selected object".

So I started to remove all general elements not relevant to the currently selected object, like "Display Filters", "Coloring Rules" and such. These should not be in an object relevant menu.

Then I tried to rearrange the remaining items by their relevance and tried to group them together where it does make sense. Please have a look at the current subversion.


Some problems I'm already aware of:

1.) the "Print" item in the packet list should set the packet range to "Selected packet only", I think I've broke that a long time ago :-( and I'll have to fix that 2.) the "Protocol Preferences" item in the packet details should not only select the relevant protocol page, but should also select the tree view correctly 3.) the "Copy" item in the packet bytes might reduce the number of selected bytes when used 4.) what should the missing "Copy" item in the packet details pane should copy? The protocol description, the selected bytes, ...?

To 3.):
This is a serious problem I currently don't have a good solution for. The problem behind this: if a specific byte is selected in the packet bytes, the protocol field corresponding to it will be selected. But if the user had selected only a protocol before, this will reduce the amount of bytes selected (from all the protocols bytes to the field bytes only). This way, I don't see a good way to "Copy"/"Export" protocol relevant bytes :-(


Conclusion: I don't see my proposal as the ultimate solution, and it has some drawbacks. However, if we want to have a more general "Copy" item for several places, this will bring up the problems I've described above anyway. The proposal I've made might be full of problems I just don't see, so please comment if you see some of them.

But: Before posting something like: I use to do "this and that" for such a while, why do you want to change it, please think about new users which have to learn all the "uncommon behaviour" Ethereal still shows and I just want to reduce uncommon behaviour, so Ethereal acts just like all the other programs around the world ;-)

Regards, ULFL