Details
P4 Description
most of the items on the applet menu of the appletviewer make no sense to a typical user. i think this should be dealt with before 2.0 freeze because this whole ui is a big red flag that says either "we don't know how to make user interfaces" or "we don't really care"... take your pick.
here are just a few of the issues:
1) trying to "save..." a random applet generally produces an unhandled IllegalArgumentException (something which should never be exposed to end-users).
2) it's not clear what restart and clone do and how they differ from one another. being able to clone objects is cool to a programmer, but users couldn't care less. we will only confuse them with terminology like this.
3) the HTML tag dialog has no borders. we should have a standard info dialog (probably a JFC thing) which handles this in a consistent fashion. in addition, the term "Dismiss" is a unixism which windows users won't recognize. Use "OK" or possibly "Close" (depending on context) instead. the dialog should not have frame-style ornaments. it should look like a normal windows dialog.
4) applet info dialog has insufficient explanation of what info is being displayed or where it came from. Dismiss should be "OK" again.
5) the properties dialog has inappropriate layout (edits are the wrong height and everything looks awful if you resize the dialog), poor use of spacing, no accelerators, no borders, the wrong frame ornaments, use of combo boxes where radio buttons would be more appropriate, use of "apply" where "OK" is more correct and no explanation of what proxy server/port are. in addition, this dialog would benefit greatly from some iconic graphics. the proxy port field should be numeric-only, limited to 5 characters and validated. in addition, the server and port should possibly be checked on dialog dismissal.
6) the character encoding information definitely belongs in some configuration/information dialog. the option and it's results have basically no meaning to the typical user.
7) consider reorganizing all this configuration info in a nice tabbed properties dialog.
here are just a few of the issues:
1) trying to "save..." a random applet generally produces an unhandled IllegalArgumentException (something which should never be exposed to end-users).
2) it's not clear what restart and clone do and how they differ from one another. being able to clone objects is cool to a programmer, but users couldn't care less. we will only confuse them with terminology like this.
3) the HTML tag dialog has no borders. we should have a standard info dialog (probably a JFC thing) which handles this in a consistent fashion. in addition, the term "Dismiss" is a unixism which windows users won't recognize. Use "OK" or possibly "Close" (depending on context) instead. the dialog should not have frame-style ornaments. it should look like a normal windows dialog.
4) applet info dialog has insufficient explanation of what info is being displayed or where it came from. Dismiss should be "OK" again.
5) the properties dialog has inappropriate layout (edits are the wrong height and everything looks awful if you resize the dialog), poor use of spacing, no accelerators, no borders, the wrong frame ornaments, use of combo boxes where radio buttons would be more appropriate, use of "apply" where "OK" is more correct and no explanation of what proxy server/port are. in addition, this dialog would benefit greatly from some iconic graphics. the proxy port field should be numeric-only, limited to 5 characters and validated. in addition, the server and port should possibly be checked on dialog dismissal.
6) the character encoding information definitely belongs in some configuration/information dialog. the option and it's results have basically no meaning to the typical user.
7) consider reorganizing all this configuration info in a nice tabbed properties dialog.