| Guidelines | |||||||||||||||||
|
Basics Menus
Statusbar Content Area Dialogs Keys Mouse Drag and Drop printable version (ps)/(pdf) |
| Links |
|
Icon Style Guide |
 |
Menus
Settings
| o Show Menubar | ||
| o Show Toolbar | ||
| o Show Statusbar | ||
| o Show any other hideable elements | ||
| Application-specific entries | ||
| Configure Key Bindings... | ||
| Configure Component... | ||
| Configure Appname... | ||
If you allow the user to hide the menubar, it can lead to a confusing situation because the user can not go back to the menubar to re-enable the menu. Therefore, when the menubar is hidden, the application should provide a "Show Menubar" option as the first item in popup menus in the content area (RMB menus). The application should always make sure the user knows how to re-enable the menu.
|
A good way to teach the user how to get the menubar back is to pop up a dialog when the menubar is hidden. This dialog should explain how the menubar can be re-enabled. Since more experienced users will not be interested in this information, the dialog should have a checkbox labeled "Don't show this dialog again", which should do just that. |
KDE distinguishes between options and the configuration of an application. See also the Settings chapter of this style guide.
Options are the top part of the setting menu. Everything above the bottom seperator can be changed like this. For almost all needs there will not have to be an extra dialog for the options part. As said in the Settings part the options are automatically saved when the application exits.
The configuration of an application can be changed with the "Configure...." menu option(s). Changes in the configuration of an application are saved when the user presses "OK" in the configuration dialog and take immediate effect in all application instances!. (Even if the other instances belong to a different UNIX process.)
Previous