User talk:Wjjohnst

Custom Toolbar Enhancements

Custom toolbars seem really limited in my opinion. Right now they're limited to a simple toolbox with a palette inside it and a few permanent toolbars defined. Users can add custom toolbars to the box, and settings for those toolbars are stored as preferences. Settings for toolbars are system wide so that one toolbar can not be created that with mode=text and another without it.

I know I'm getting greedy with unncessary features, but I'm gonna list the things I'd like to see in toolbars from a customization point of view.

Toolbar Ideas

• Custom toolbars shouldn't be limited to a set at one point in the page.
  • You should be able to define toolbars at the top of a webbrowser and at the bottom and have both be customizable (same for right and left sides).
  • Doing this pretty much means removing the toolbox entirely, and so I'd say that applications should be able to just specify a toolbarpalette and toolbars. Toolbars with a customise property=true would be customizable. Toolbars without the property shouldn't be.
  • On the same track, toolbars should be draggable to the top, bottom, right, or left of the application if the user wants. I'd suggest this be done through a grabber that appeared only when toolbars were in customize mode. Once again, toolbars that wanted to be draggable should specify it through a property.
• Toolbars should be customisable on a per-toolbar level.
  • I'd say this should be doable through the toolbar's context menu. Right clicking on a toolbar should show you:
    • an option to Customize the toolbar widgets you see
    • an option to bring up Properties for that particular toolbar. This could be both a generic toolbar properties dialog, or a toolbar specific one if the toolbar specified one.
  • Toolbars don't need names. They need to appear and disappear dynamically based on what the user is doing. If a toolbar is empty it should disappear, but if the user is dragging a new item in an area where no toolbar is available, one should appear if possible and be ready to accept the item.

Toolbar Customize Dialog

• The toolbar customize dialog should morph form dramatically, perhaps into some sort of richlistbox. The box could show both descriptions of toolbar items, along with names and icons. This would also clean up a lot of the code in the current implementation.

Toolbar Palette

• Pretty much every piece of front UI in the application should be a toolbar item, and should be draggable somewhere else if you wanted.
  • I'd like to be able to drag elements from the statusbar somewhere else in the browser if I wanted. Or to drag elements from the nav bar to the status bar. This would be possible if the statusbar was part of the toolbox, but using current model, I don't think it is.
  • In a slightly more FF centric point. I'd really like to see the tabbar morphed into a toolbar item too. That would allow users to move it easily to wherever they wanted it in their browser, saving them some extra screen space, and would allow things like the taboverflow button, and newtab button to be easily added or removed to the tabbar, without requiring users who don't need them to see them. Hence why I say, I really wish pretty much every piece of front panel UI was a toolbar item.
• Toolbaritems should be able to specify whether they're reusable or not. Items with reusable=true should be able to be placed on the page multiple times if the user wants. This helps move spacers out of the current custom toolbar implmentation, and cleans up the code somewhat. It also allows for some neat widgets like searchboxes to be setup in more useful ways for power users.
• On the same path, you should be able to specify some types of toolbars as toolbars on toolbars. For instance, the URL bar in FF has been picking up more and more icons as time goes by. These icons should be draggable out of the URL bar if the user wants, or other icons should be draggable into the URLbar.

Custom User Toolbars

• I think these are really useless and don't know a single user who uses them by choice. Removing them entirely wouldn't hurt the code. They could be added back via an extension easily.
• However, if they do NEED to be implemented in some fashion, the current pref system just seems... antiquated. We've got a ton of persistant storage services going now, but I'm not sure which one is right for implementing this.
• Also, most modern applications implement this feature, by automatically creating new toolbars when the user drags an item near the bottom of another toolbar but not on it. Something like this seems much more... user friendly to me.