Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
Furthermore, Apple are not infallible. I can see plenty of potential problems with instant-apply dialogs, and not a whole lot of advantages. So why do we want them to become the norm?What problems do you see with them? I imagined a whole lot before trying it, but having used them in Nautilus and OS X I think they work great.
Sitting here, looking at the gnome control center, I can see many current configuration options in which instant-apply has the potential to be quite damaging. The most obvious ones are window manager configuration (as in, changing the current WM) and the metatheme capplet. I have witnessed X crashes caused by changing WMs (usually with enlightenment or similar), and the current metatheme setup means that you cannot ever retrieve your *current* theme, unless it is also a metatheme. One further issue is those situations where instant-apply is not possible. Again, looking at the current control center, the "Look and Feel->Applications" section springs to mind. At the moment (I am using gnome 1.4-ximian), all of these changes will only take effect when an application is restarted. Unless gtk-2.0 will change this, this means that you have inconsistencies in when the instant-apply is actually instant.
The other objection to instant-apply is that saying 'oh - you can just go and change the settings back to what they were' implies that the users *know* what the settings were. Some of the standard configuration options tend to be quite complex, making reverting settings is a fairly important feature.
The advantage to instant-apply is that it makes it really easy totweak multiple settings to taste.
Which sounds great, until you realise that the majority of the user population is going to do more harm than good via tweaking.
It also removes unnecessary complexity - there is no real reason why it should take an extra button press in addition to just changing the control to make the setting take effect. Imagine, for instance, a font selection drop down in a word processing program's toolbar. It would be crazy if you had to press an Apply or OK button to get that font selection to take effect, wouldn't it?
Yes, but then a font selection can (usually) be undone, and is very unlikely to be damaging. Nevertheless, I have witnessed people get *very* frustrated at trying to find the font they were previously using in a list of 100+ fonts. "So, were you using 'courier (abisource)', 'courier (adobe)', 'courier (bitstream)', 'courier (urw)', 'courier new (abisource)' or 'courier new (monotype)'. Okay, so that's extreme, but still...
Kai Willadsen ps. First post to this list, so apologies if I'm out of line.