Discussion: New Settings
Hi all,
I just installed 996 and so far I have to say good job this time! The only thing I'm not quite satified with is the new way of editing the project and general settings. Personally I preferred the old way. In my opinion I could browse my settings faster since I didn't have to close each settings section with 'ok' or 'cancel' except I changed a setting.
What do other EAP members think about the new settings menu???
-Steffen
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I think "looks unprofessional" rings deeper for Mac users than others, because the Setting window looks like a cheap cousin of the System Preferences. Opening them side by side, it looks like a poster-child for why native is "better" than swing - there are so many "niceties" that address the minor complaints about Settings in the System Preferences. But they are things that are not realistic using swing:
- resize the window dynamically to accomodate the individual dialog without popping another window
- maintain "most frequently used" (so you can navigate even when looking at a dialog) with drag&drop
- subtle highliting to segregate sections of modest proportions
- smooth animation for transitions that would otherwise be jarring (kudos for the text-scroll animation, though, which I hated at first, but now rely on for maintaining context - now BBEdit feels like the poor cousin! :)
- super-slick font/photo-real icon/textured background rendering
I'm reserving judgement, since I see pro's and con's, and the interface requirments for development are more keyboard/mouse/poweruser than feels-real-in-my-hand (ie: I picked up the esc key alternative sub-consciously - as it should be).
If someone could come up with a clever way to avoid the pop-up, I suspect most of the objections would subside...
mike
Maxim
>I've honestly read all the discussion here and actually failed to
>extract a single reason why previous UI was better other than emotional ones
>like new one "looks unprofessional" or old one was "more convenient".
>
It seems to me we gave you a lot of calm, motivated and detailed reasons
behind our objections.
I barely noticed the emotional ones, as they amounted for only a few %.
Before commenting your comments, a quick question :
Do you honestly find that locating the string "bill"
in this format :
-
some text more
there him here
blabla bill gates
is not many times harder that formated the old way
some
text
more
there
him
here
blabla
bill
gates
If you are as efficient with the 1st format, then our brains are
definitively not wired the same way.
>just list a reasons why change settings UI decision has been taken and
>advantages of new UI:
>
>1. Number of configurables scalability. It is obvious that UI that shows all
>available options at the same time is more usable. Any scrollbars are just
>compromise.
>
Once again : why did you bluntly ignore the 5-month old suggestion of
using small icons on the left of the text?
This would solve most of the scalability problem.
The rest could be handled by a better keyboard navigation, and some cool
dynamic scrolling in the left-side toolbar.
>2. All configuration options are shown up in one place. It is common
>situation one searches for some option in IDE Settings while it actually
>resides in Project Properties which is not as easy to switch to. This has
>been actually a big problem for new IDEA users.
>
and
>I bet one would search for a long time for Local History
>options if we wouldn't change options UI.
>
So, you're making the first step a little easier for newbies, but we
pay it dearly for the rest of the voyage !
I don't see that as a progress.
About displaying IDE and Project settings in 1 place,
you could easily fit the 2 settings categories under 1 screen, by
allowing to toggle the left-side toolbar - the icons -, from 1 set to
the other with 1 key.
I can even imagine a cool 3-D effect, where we would see the icon column
revolve/flip , and show its other face. This would open the door, and
let you regroup more set under the same root, by adding more faces to
the icon column.
>Thanks for listening. And we're always open to other/opposite ideas when
>those are motivated.
>
>
1/ Most of the reactions were carefully detailed, and motivated
2/ The strength of the reactions must make you think further about this
change implication on us.
Compare it to the reactions to the absence of "Save All" in the file
menu. This .should hint you that we are ready for change and adventure,
but there are some change we don't agree to.
Alain
Maxim,
thanks for taking the time to write this. I'll reply to each point in turn
below & try to be constructive and objective rather than just saying "I
liked the old one better".
Maxim Shafirov (JetBrains) wrote:
I don't agree. Showing too much at once can lead to visual overload for the
user, which makes it harder to narrow down to the thing you're interested
in. This could perhaps be improved by grouping the icons. But it may
actually be beneficial to have some of them off screen, with a scroll bar:
there is that well known cognitive threshold of around 7 items that can be
held simultaneously in very short term memory, after all.
For the scalability issue - if it actually does turn out to be an issue -
you could consider using both the horizontal text arrangement for the icons
(as Alain suggested) and a tree with groups of icons instead of a flat list
(similar to what was done for the inspection results, as someone else has
pointed out).
I think it's great that all settings will be found from the one place now.
The problem with the new settings UI, in my opinion, is that everything pops
up in a new dialog. Consider your example of a user searching for some
option: now, instead of simply clicking on each icon in turn they have to
click on the icon then click on cancel/ok. It's a longer process and the
mouse is having to move all over the place. I know it's been argued that the
user can keep one finger on the ESC key to close the dialogs quickly, but
the fact is that many people won't do this and will be inconvenienced.
As a side note, I've just noticed that the Run/Debug configurations are not
available from the settings dialog. Is that intentional?
Whether it looks good or not is down to everyone's personal preference. I
think it looks better for them all to be the same size; evidently there's
people who don't agree with that.
A practical consideration is that occasionally you need to move the settings
dialog aside to see something in the editor before you know what you need to
set. You can't do that with the new UI: you can move the dialog for
whichever group of settings you currently have open, but that being modal
means you can't move the Settings dialog itself. There are the obvious
workarounds for this; it's just a matter of convenience for the user.
The same would apply to the original settings UI if the keyboard mappings
had been implemented for it as well.
True, but that was only ever a minor problem from a users point of view and
always seemed to be easily fixed each time it occurred.
Cheers,
Vil.
--
Vilya Harvey
vilya.harvey@digitalsteps.com / digital steps /
(W) +44 (0)1483 469 480
(M) +44 (0)7816 678 457 http://www.digitalsteps.com/
Oops, the formating went wrong, and it doesn't make sense anymore :
Here is the correctly formated question part :
-
Maxim,
Before commenting your comments, a quick question :
...
Do you honestly find that locating the string "bill"
in this format :
-
some text more
there him here
blabla bill gates
is not many times harder that formated the old way
some
text
more
there
him
here
blabla
bill
gates
If you are as efficient with the 1st format, then our brains are
definitively not wired the same way.
In the previous 2 messages, the 2nd group/format was formatted in 1 column.
It's wrongly displayed by my Thunderbird email client, but it looks fine in the web forum, here :
http://www.intellij.net/forums/thread.jsp?forum=22&thread=60406&tstart=0&trange=100#650355
Vilya Harvey wrote:
>
>
There is at least 1 other way to regroup all options under one root :
1/- Take the old settings look
2/- replace big icons by smaller icons on the left of the text
3/- fix the keyboard navigation problem
and (here is the new stuff),
4/- map
to a new action,
that would see the left icon column/toolbar, flip/revolve in 3D, to show
its second face.
Face 1 would be the Project settings icons
Face 2 would be the IDE settings icons
Adding more faces - icons set is a no-brainer.
Alain
For an unordered set like your example I actually found Bill easier to find in the 3 x 3 array than in the list! I'm guessing that's because I can use my eyes' ability to scan in 2 dimensions to reduce the time, kind of like a binary search rather than a straight linear ;)
But I do see your point for an ordered list however. You must first do some analysis to work out which way the objects are arranged in the grid (top-down/left-right) which is tricky if the first c+1 elements (where c is col count) all begin with the same letter.
N.
Alain Ravet wrote:
I'm not so sure about this. It's functionally the same as a tabbed pane
without random access to the tab pages. It may not be a problem with only
two categories of settings icons (IDE and Project), but as categories get
subdivided and new categories appear, this will quickly get unwieldy.
Something like the icon bar from Outlook might be more suitable for this,
but I don't think that's a particularly good bit of UI design either.
The other alternatives I can think of are:
- Use a tabbed pane for the different settings categories.
- Use a drop-down list for the names of the different settings categories.
When a category is selected, the icons for that category are displayed in
the list on the left.
- Use a tree, with a branch for each category of settings.
Cheers,
Vil.
--
Vilya Harvey
vilya.harvey@digitalsteps.com / digital steps /
(W) +44 (0)1483 469 480
(M) +44 (0)7816 678 457 http://www.digitalsteps.com/
beetle <no_mail@jetbrains.com> wrote:
I believe that was me ;) Unfortunately, most of the postings here are
complaints. But that does not necessarily mean that the majority of
users does not like the UI.
I also posted a screenshot of the OS X preference panel. It only has a
few icons less than idea and I don't consider it to be "cluttered" at
all. Adding those dragable icons even allows those people that regularly
need to configure things to access those quickly.
I believe that collapsing categories make it harder to remember where
things are (because the recognized structure changes frequently).
Oh, and I forgot: Categories would even allow plug in authors to add
preferences easily (Category "Plugins") ;)
Dirk Dittert
Matthew Welch <no_mail@jetbrains.com> wrote:
But the old UI didn't scale as well as the new UI. Imagine the old
preference UI with 20 Icons on the left side. Even if they are a lot
smaller than they were -- you wouldn't find what you are looking for or
you'd have to scroll a lot to access it.
That's why they call it EAP -- it's not a "product" yet :)
Dirk Dittert
Michael Abato <mrabato@earthlink.net> wrote:
I'd say that is a matter of taste if you really consider it to be the
way to go ;) Personally, I don't really like those zoom effects for the
preference panel. But it would solve the
"I-don't-like-those-popup-dialogs" problem. I guess that's why they came
up with those resizing dialogs in OS X.
Why isn't that possible? I don't event think it would be a lot of work
to implement that.
I guess they'll add some more fine tuning, but in the end, the most
difficult thing will probably be different L&F settings (=> different
colors) and different font settings. It can look good.
Not really required from my perspective.
Dirk Dittert
Alain Ravet <alain.ravet.list@wanadoo.be> wrote:
How do yo know that? Maybe they tried but didn't really like what they
came up with?
Because you are used to the old way of doing it (as I am). Do you really
spend that much time reconfiguring your IDE that this reorganization is
a serious problem? How do you survive as a software developer with all
that quickly changing code out there?
I guess till the end of the EAP you'll see that settings dialog often
enough to remember where to find things
Hope it doesn't sound to harsh -- no insult intended in any way!
Dirk Dittert
While the new settings dialog is certainly more scalable, it is IMHO at the same time also less intuitive than the old layout.
I think this could fairly easily be fixed by going to a somewhat more "control panel"esque navigation model though.
With the following minor changes, the new layout would IMHO be better than the way it used to be:
Allow for arrow/enter key navigation. Let the user navigate to the icon they want using the arrow keys and then open it using enter. Do this in addition to the current number/alpha shortcuts though, and not instead of.
When closing a sub-dialog, the last selected item should still be shown as selected, so arrow-right + enter would goto and open the next item.
Make the dialogs non-modal. If a user wants to open more than one sub-dialog at a time, this should be allowed.
and one more suggestion that is not like the windows control panel:
allow the main settings dialog to be docked for easy access.
or if you REALLY want it to look nice, make the docked settings dialog behave like the OS/X dock, with auto-resizing icons and a transparent background. Now THAT would be cool... :)
just tested it and hmmm...
it's ok (the old layout was spacial over its limits ), but i think you can say it's not the best (as i expect from idea ;))
Maxim Shafirov (JetBrains) wrote:
So, more convenient is only an emotion, maybe like more usable is also
an emotion ;)
In the end, every decision is a compromise. I can also say: just so
that scrollbars can be removed the new UI is less usable. And then we
enter into emotional arguments :)
I have already said: the first thing I do on windows is change folders
view from big icons to lists, as I find lists are much more readable.
As Alain said, and it's also my view, big icons are fine for newbies
but use too much real estate for more advanced users.
Fine, I agree with this - and I don't recall anybody objecting to
settings centralization.
On the contrary, same size/position looks good. Having dialogs popping
up with different sizes and at different positions is what looks bad.
This is what I object the most - having to open/close dialogs all the
time.
This is where the compromise I mentioned in point 1 enters:
IMO, instead of having the small disadvantage of scrollbars in the
option list, we now have the BIG disadvantage of popping dialogs :)
Could be easily resolved on the previous ui.
Same.
To finish, my vote would go to the old ui with a tree (or, more
unlikely, a tab panel) for the options.
Thanks for replying/listening to our rants.
Carlos
I do not like the new settings layout because it takes more time for me to find and change settings.
I would prefer the old layout, but with a tree in a left pane, branches for IDE, Project settings, PLUGINs, etc.
Or perhaps the left pane could be a LIST that works like the "Outlook Bar" -> tiny icons to the left of the Label, split into groups. Click on a group label (ex. "PROJECT") and that group expands and covers up the "IDE" group.
Personally - I don't even need icons. Icons are only useful if they make some sense -> a yellow star does not mean to me "Keymap".
The "save before switching tabs" could be fixed by eliminating the save/cancel buttons completely. If I change a setting, it should be changed in the config. Simple.
And please, order the items alphabetically!
Or at least give an option to order them:
alphabetically
weird random order that We Think Is Best!
Maybe JetBrains knows what items are in "General" - but I do not memorizing them. And maybe they think General is more important and should be at the 'top" - but I don't know. And after using IDEA for 2 years, I still do not know why they are in the order they are in - it is NOT the order I would use.
If I am looking for 'Keymaps' -> then I will look down the list to find the 'K' - if it was alphabetically.
With the current EAP... There is no "index" or natural order that I see - so I must scan EVERY row.
We do not do this in databases because that does not scale.
Also - some of the most important "settings" (like choosing the JDK) are only in the "Configure Project..." menu item. These are settings too!
Why are they not ALL available from the settings icon on the toolbar as part of PROJECT settings???
Makes no sense. :(
Timo
I can't think of another application which uses a palette of icons for the settings. Most common is applications using Tabbed Panels. Some of those have a single row of tabs with a scroll arrow in case the tabs extend past the edge of the dialog. Others relayout the tabs in multiple rows, which I find really ugly looking. Some even reorder the tabs when you click one of the tabs which is very disorienting.
I really liked IDEA's pre-996 Setting's panel because everything was in a single dialog liked the tabbed panel design, but having the "tabs" as icons in a vertical column in a left scrollpane was much nicer.
I have used the same design in my own application work.
This new Settings panel looks like Windows Control Panel. It is useable, but it is a step back, IMO. Windows Control Panel has to popup each item in a separate dialog because they must handle 3rd party applications,e.g. Java Plug In, and they can't integrate at the panel level. If they could, I would like the Window's Control Panel to use IDEA's pre-996 Settings panel design.
For me the biggest issue is the fact there are individual dialogs popping up.
Several people have mentioned the advantage of separate dialogs is that each dialog is sized appropriately.
But I really don't want to have to resize/reposition each dialog. Before, I would just resize the pre-996 Settings dialog to be as big as necessary, or even maximize it when I needed to. It doesn't matter to me that some panels have extra space.
It is definately harder to browse the settings. It was so much easier to just click each icon and have the right handside panel be replaced. Now, you click an icon, then you need to press Cancel to close it. (And the cancel button is located in a different place each time on your screen because each dialog is a different size). Hitting the 'ESCAPE' key is a nice shortcut, but it is a poweruser feature; New users will be hitting the CANCEL button.
I agree with the comments about displaying the settings as text, displayed alphabetically, using a tree or 'outlook style' tabs to separate IDE from project settings in the left hand side.
As I scanned the Settings icon palette, I realized that I was only looking at the text not the icon. Ditch the icons in teh settings dialog. Icons are great on the toolbar because you have the same icon next the corresponding action in the menubar, but the settings palette icon's aren't displayed anywhere else, so not as useful. Also, many of the icons are not intuitive, not the fault of the icon designer, but because the word they are trying to represent are very conceptual or technical, e.g. External Tools, WebLogic Integration. In the menubar and toolbar, the most useful icons are the standard ones like open, save, find/search, copy, paste.
Intellij's Automatic Excpetion Reporting has been so successfull, I suggest you add a new feature to IntelliJ EAPs: Automated Polling of User's on New Features.
For example, when a user downloads EAP 996, when they launch that new Settings panel, after they click close to close the Settings Panel, IntelliJ should popup a question "We would like to get your feedback on the new Settings Dialgo: Do you like it better than the old UI?
No opinion
Don't care
I like the NEW settings icon palette better.
I like the OLD settings dialog better.
If you think there is a natural bias to favor the OLD UI because that is what people are accustomed to, you could repoll them again in EAP 1000+ asking them again.
The advantage to embedding this into the EAPs is that you will get many more replies from your users rather than just the vocal users on this forum. Not everyone has time to post on these forums.
Hopefully, there is some way to limit the responses to one per licensed user, otherwise someone could stuff the ballot box.
Then, you could have a web page which lists these polls and let's use see the results.
may I do it here?
--
Dmitry Skavish
>
The behaviour of hitting the cancel button instead of pressing escape
is not a begginer thing.
I'm not a beginner and think of myself as somewhat of a keyboard
addict: I hate it when the mouse has to be used while writing code:
every visual exacting activity like using the mouse for anything
needing precision (like using menus, clicking radio buttons, opening
checkboxes, etc) is a resource intensive activity for the brain,
diverting resources/attention that previously where applied to writing
code.
After this detour let's continue to the point about escape not being a
solution to the problem :)
I find that when interacting with an interface where using the mouse is
mandatory (like the settings panels), the keyboard handling part of the
brain deactivates itself and it becomes most difficult pressing any
key. The usual behaviour is that the mouse does everything even if it
has to travel miles all over the screen to do it.
And this is why having incomplete support for keyboard usage in an
interface is almost as useless as having no support at all: as soon as
the mouse is used, it takes control of every interactive resource
relegating the keyboard interface to never never land :)
Carlos
Well said! I meant to but forgot to this point in my previous post.
I find that most of the time, abstract icons do not significantly add
legibility to lists of items.
In the package tree, there are lots of entries, but very few different
and very descriptive icons - I can look at the list and distinguish
between interfaces/classes/xml files at a glance: I for interfaces, C
for classes, X for xml files, etc (the only icon I miss is an E for the
exception classes - hint, hint... :)
I can say that after two and a half years of using idea, i haven't the
faintest idea what the icons in the list of options look like :)
Yes, looking at the settings panel again I confirm this: to choose any
entry I have to read the text below the entry as the icons don't mean a
thing.
Jetbrains: scrap the settings icons and put back the old list (or a
tree) with text only options. This should take care of the scalabilty
for some time to come :)
Carlos
Carlos
>I can say that after two and a half years of using idea, i haven't the
>faintest idea what the icons in the list of options look like :)
>
I guess it's because they don't differ enough :
Look at the kitten picture, of CamouflagePlugin.
Look at Dave Kriewall's 2 plugins icons: I recognize their red triangle,
a family trait.
Look at the PsiViewer icon.
Those 4 catch my eyes in a snap.
If there were a beautifier plugin, with a playmate as an icon, I'm sure
you would remember it, and also spot it in a snap.
>Jetbrains: scrap the settings icons and put back the old list (or a
>tree) with text only options. This should take care of the scalabilty
>for some time to come :)
>
That would be a little dry, wouldn't it?
For the reasons - well, the examples - mentioned above, I'd prefer small
icons on the left. We wouldn't loose much space, but would gain in
readability.
Alain
We could get rid of the icons completely and use a tree instead of a
list instead.
Tom
Thomas Singer <idea@NOregnisSpam.de> wrote:
You mean like Netbeans does? I don't like that idea very much.
Especially if they aren't completely visible. Collapsing and expanding
nodes also cause some work until you find the right node. There isn't
enough space for large icons in a tree.
With a little more structure, the current layout allows you to find the
right spot blindly after some time.
Dirk Dittert
Alex <no_mail@jetbrains.com> wrote:
I consider more tabs than you can fit on the screen or multiple rows of
tabs as bad UI design. Not all platforms support multiple rows of tabs
(e.g. Mac).
Why do you move or resize the dialogs? Just set up what you want to set
up and press either ok or cancel. Do you have an example where you need
to see the underlying editor?
I guess that'll be fixed soon.
Why do you prefer alphabetical ordering? Why should "External Tools"
follow "Editor"? If I like to set up my editor, I like to have all
related things nearby so that I don't have to look through all items.
Also star for keyboard isn't very intuitive. But that can be fixed by
choosing better icons.
Dirk Dittert
Carlos Costa e Silva <carlos@keysoft.pt> wrote:
But that is not necessarily a problem of UI design but of bad choice of
icons. Or maybe you just don't remember then conciously?
Dirk Dittert
I don't know Netbeans, but I know Eclipse and OpenOffice.
Tom
You are not alone. Multiple rows of tabs is bad UI design. If not all
tabs fix on screen one has to use a different control to separate the panes.
When setting colors or fonts of the editor it makes sense to move the
dialog.
+1
Options must be grouped logically rather than sorted alphabetically.
Or by getting rid of them. Also think of plugin developers which not
necessarily are good graphic designers.
Tom
It seems to me that a compromise solution might work well. If we could keep all the settings together, that would make the panel more useful, but scalability is an issue as more plug-in designers add their icons.
I agree with the idea of using tab panes to separate categories. This leads to kind a tree-like approach, but I would imagine the tabs would be fairly coarse groupings. (IDE Settings, Project Settings, Plugin Settings). Within each tab would be the old-style settings. This would still allow a second tab-pane inside if necessary.
I also agree that the minor inconvience of scrollbars is outweighed by the inconvenience of separate dialogs.
--Dan
-1 for tab panes to separate each settings group (currently large
icons), because
a) they would arrange in multiple rows (bad)
b) tabs within tabs are very bad
Tom