Hi Łukasz, let's see how open you will be to criticism after this mail. :) On 4/13/07, Łukasz 'Sil2100' Zemczak <sil2100@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There were a few reasons for my decision of partial re-usage of the previous design - the first one being familiarity. Since eventually there will be a lot of old BeOS-timers using Haiku, radical change of the interface doesn't seem a good idea - considering the fact that the .pkg format is very strictly related to BeOS too.
If we get a much better design then I think radical changes are OK. Let's also consider creating an installer UI that is simpler than the BeOS one. If we don't like it we can still have your suggestion (needs only minor fixes for compliance or wording).
Now for the differences. Instead of a single installation information label on the left side, I propose a tab view with two tabs available. The first one would include the previous information (size, free space etc.). The Files tab, however, would include a directory tree of the package files to be installed and their installation paths. The same could be seen after clicking the Begin button in SoftwareWallet, opened as a separate window. In my opinion, this was way not too intuitive, presumably if someone just wanted to know the files being installed by the package. This can be seen on the simple concept above. What do you think?
Maybe instead of "<Package name>" the window title should be "Install: <Package Name>" to make it easier to identify? I'd change the label "Groups" to "Installation Type" or something similar. I think the tabs view should start at the same height as the list view (instead of its label) to make it more obvious that both views are connected. The list view's label could be replaced with a BBox to make this even more obvious. There could be capitalization issues, but I don't think we have agreed on any rules, yet. ------------------------------- The following suggestions would result in a different UI, so I want to keep this part separate: I like that you replaced the alert after pressing Begin with a simple tab, but OTOH, do we really need that info, at all? It's still available in the log files. Isn't it sufficient if you just select the target location and that's it? As far as I remember, many apps only have one single profile and there are rarely more than three profiles. IMHO, a list view is only appropriate if: * you expect to have many entries * switching between entries must be very efficient * you must have an overview of all elements I think that of those three only the last one might apply, but a pop-up field could be better suited for this task and result in a more compact UI. Is there any need for splitting the installation volume and the installation folder ("Install on ... in ...")? Why not have one pop-up with the full path? The pop-up could automatically offer pre-defined paths for every volume and a "Custom..." item for choosing your own path (when paths can't be chosen "Custom..." would be grayed-out). An alternative installer UI could look like this: | Install: CoolApp2 | |-----------------------------------------------------------| | This is CoolApp2, a cool app for doing | cool stuff under Haiku. It's even cooler | than CoolApp1. | |- Installation Type: [Typical \/] ----------------------| | Install everything the average user needs. | | Size: 15.4MB |------------------------------------------------------------| | | Install To: [/Haiku/apps \/] (N Free) [[Begin]] -| |------------------------------------------------------------| Bye, Waldemar Kornewald