Gnome HIGy Design

[huertanix]

The current design is p close to what I have in mind. Some changes I recommend:

• Using a textbox UI element to hold the phrase in; Lets people know they can edit it and then copy it if they want to.
• Having a copy button next to the textbox which will highlight and copy the text when that button is clicked on. It should be a button UI element though to make sure folks know right away that it is meant to be clicked on. A "Copied!" confirmation message (The Gnome HIG is a little ambiguous on how to do this for non-system-wide notifications) should appear... wondering if a simple bit of hover text would work for this.
• The new passphrase button is a kind of destructive action (current passphrase goes away) and should be far enough away from the copy button that it won't be accidentally clicked on while copying the current passphrase. Like the copy button, it should be a button in the UI to make sure people know it is clickable.
• Added a colon to Number of words: since I noticed some Ubuntu/Gnome apps did similar, but it's not necessitated by the Gnome HIG writing style (https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/writing-style.html.en).
• I figure the wordlist selection should live in its own dialog available in a menu system, was thinking: Phrasebook -> Word Lists or Phrasebook -> Preferences if we have other options we think we need to add.

[simonft]

Thanks for this feedback! I hadn't seen GNOME's HIG. I'll give it a readthough.

I actually was thinking that this should explicitly not encourage/allow copying of the passphrase. Retyping the passphrase helps the user remember it. It's also a reasonable final check against there being anything weird in the passphrase that the user doesn't notice (like a unicode character that looks like another character, or an accent). It seems risky to me for the user to copy/paste now and type it in manually when they need to access the data. I don't feel strongly about this at all though. Curious to hear your opinion.

I had the open new file button in the menu bar originally, but I moved it out because it seemed weird to have only a single item in the task bar. It was also not super easy to find, and when I add an option to switch the language i want to integrate the two of them together somehow. The more I think about it the more I want to move it back into the menu bar though. It makes the interface quite a bit less confusing, and if the most common case is not going to be opening a new file I think it's reasonable to hide it a little.