Re: [HIG] Capplet buttons/guidelines

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> Instant apply:
> 
> * No buttons if it's coming up inside the control-center window.
> 
> * Just a [Close] button (or maybe [Done]) if the capplet is coming up
> in a separate window.

I'm sure Greg will have something to say about that :)

> * Just an [Apply] button if it's coming up inside the control-center
> window.
> 
> * [Save] and [Cancel] buttons if it's coming up in a separate window
> (you're saving the settings).

"Save" usually saves things to a user-specified file, I don't think we
want to use that term IMHO.  And this means capplets and any other
random properties/preferences dialog are using significantly different
buttons, despite the fact they're doing exactly the same thing.

> Help can be a menu item, since the control center window already has a
> menu bar with a help menu. The help feature is rearely used and
> needlessly clutters up the main button area.

This is a good point, although I might argue that Help might be rather
more often used if there was an explicit help button right there in the
dialog-- you're not trying to tell me people aren't using help because
they're just not confused by any of the options in any of our capplets
:)

> Since I omitted any kind of revert feature, this means that the
> capplets have to be designed to make settings easy to change back by
> hand. 

Which means what?  It's nearly always easy enough to change them back by
hand, the problem is remembering what the value was before, as most
people don't go to the trouble of remembering.

> If this is too hard in some cases, I would rather see a proper
> "Undo" feature than a monolithic revert.

I thought we agreed in the previous discussion that "Undo" should only
be used for changes that affected a document, not dialog-level changes? 
(And then we'd still end up with the same number of buttons we had
before anyway).

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems