Toolbar confusing for new users

Thanks Tom! I like the new layout, I just need to request a feature freeze break for Lucid for this.

(If accepted this will be in the next simple-scan release 0.9.10 which contains bug fixes.

Great, I look forward to following that :-)

simple-scan is fairly new, I don't think that we have a lot of screenshots for the docs yet. I subscribed ubuntu-doc team to sign off.

However, I don't quite understand the rationale: Is the idea that you should use the buttons from left to right in a normal process? wouldn't you need to select the mode (text/photo) even before you click "scan"? Also, why did the proposed layout drop the save button?

The proposed layout added the save button back in!

Hello,
you are probably looking at the order currently included as opposed to the new one proposed; in fact many of the issues you highlight are exactly the ones this change is designed to fix.

The change focuses on 3 key areas:
 - Structural Consistency
The new layout completely follows the Gnome Human Interface guidelines on toolbars, having the same order as the menus, and uses the order suggested for office applications. The principles are the same as those used in gedit, nautilus and Eye Of Gnome.
 - Easy of use
The new layout has a save button and a label for the crop button; I can guarantee you that without these many new users will be asking how to save the images produced. As of these changes, users are able to access the entire functionality of the application graphically.
 - Visual Consistency
I have moved the mode selector to the end of the toolbar for 2 reasons. Firstly, in the new Ubuntu theme it looks visually distinct from the rest of the icons and would look messy in the middle of the toolbar (placing it at the start would be inconsistent with the rest of the desktop). Its functionality is also conceptually distinct as it changes the mode of the application instead of initiating an action (things which perform different tasks should look different).

There currently isn't any in depth documentation for it in the official documentation, so this change design doesn't affect the documentation.

Tom and others, I'd be interested in your feedback on the mode selector as it's part of the UI that never feels quite like it fits.

The main reason I had it beside the scan button is it only affects the behaviour of the scan button. By placing it too far away it is perhaps confusing as to what it does (changing it doesn't give any visual feedback).

Some ideas:
- Putting it in the preferences dialog. Not good as you may be scanning different documents at the same time. Hard to discover.
- Putting it as radio buttons inside the scan dropdown menu. Hard to discover.
- Making two scan buttons "Scan text", "Scan photo"
- Always scanning in colour and providing a post-processing option, i.e. "optimise for text".

The main case for the text mode is otherwise files are too large for sending/archiving.

(Note any changes would be post 1.0, I think the mode selector solution is good enough).

I went ahead and implemented merging the document type into the scan menu. See attached screenshot. I really like this change so I've committed it upstream.

Alex, this change has a small documentation change in the "Scanning a Page" section. OK to do this. Note that apparently documentation is currently unable to be translated, see bug 543282.

The last comment should read:
"Alex, is it OK to make this documentation change?"

Great, overall this is probably the best option.

Ah, indeed I mixed up the images wrt. the save button. By all means put it back, yes!

To put in my 2c about the mode selector, I actually like the "postprocessing" option, so that you can scan once, and then quickly switch between them to see what is more appropriate (you might scan a document which is mostly text, but has a few embedded graphics in it which you want to keep as color). But I figure this is a bigger structural change which might not be suitable for lucid, so a dropdown menu "scan text"/"scan photo" sounds fine. After you used the application once, you only ever want to use the keyboard shortcuts anyway, I figure. Like Ctrl+T and Ctrl+P? Or even better, a single key such as 't' and 'p' or F2 and F3?

The document string freeze is today, so I think you will be okay as long as to finish the change today. I can't find this section about scanning a page, the only page I can find just tells you to open Simple Scan and then leaves you to work the rest out, where is it?

This bug was fixed in the package simple-scan - 0.9.10-0ubuntu1

---------------
simple-scan (0.9.10-0ubuntu1) lucid; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - Change default scan direction to top-to-bottom
    - Call sane_cancel after each document, not duing multi page scans
      (LP: #536864)
    - Set X-GNOME-Gettext-Domain in .desktop file (LP: #538977)
    - Fix memory leak in page_set_scan_area()
    - Fix read buffering when reading large images
    - Fix moving crop on pages after first (LP: #542830)
    - Load color profiles for scanner and save them in output files
    - Fix broken logic in picking nearest supported scan resolution
      (LP: #545807)
    - Add save button back into toolbar (LP: #543384)
    - Put text beside crop toolbutton (LP: #543384)
    - Merge document type into scan menu (LP: #543384)
  * debian/control:
    - Build-depend on libdput-glib-1-dev
 -- Robert Ancell <email address hidden> Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:42:38 +1100