First off, let me tell you that ethereal is a great program, that
makes it very easy to anaylze network traffic, and also to learn &
understand network protocols. It helped me track down & fix a bug in
apple's PPPoE implementation in Darwin/OS X, would have taken me much
much longer w/o ethereal!
But I also would like to utter one criticism: your preference dialog
is a middle catastropy from a human interface POV. You abuse tabs to
offer well over a dozen pages in this dialog, which is not good. Not
the least problem is that it takes loads of horizontal screen estate.
Many other apps do this, too, I know, but that's no excuse ;) Tabs
are nice as long as you have 3-5 items, but not if you have that many.
The proper way of doing a preference dialog with so many items
usually is to have on the left side a list box with text entries,
instead of using tabs. Ideally, the entries in this list box are also
grouped, e.g. to seperated the settings for protocol decoders from
the other settings.
I must admit that I never coded using GTK so far, so I can't tell how
hard it would be to switch to this scheme, but believe me, it should
be worth the effort. It is easier to handle for the user, plus it is
easier to extend it with more pages.
Look at Mozilla, Netscape, IE, Gnome control-center and man more
applications to see what I mean ;)
Otherwise I am very much happy with your application. I made a
package for the fink system (http://fink.sourceforge.net) so that OS
X users can easily install it.
Thank you for your work,
Max
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Max Horn
Software Developer
email: <mailto:max@xxxxxxxxx>
phone: (+49) 6151-494890
