Re: Close buttons in dialogs

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 28 Jul 2009, at 07:07, Sérgio Neves wrote:

> Hi,
> Since we are talking about close buttons, I don't want to miss the
> oportunity to ask why the majority of applications use only one  
> button, the
> close, when in fact they should use an ok button and a cancell  
> button. I ask
> this not because Ms Windows applications uses it all the time, but  
> because
> there is one rule of interface design saying that it may be possible  
> for us
> to undo any changes we have made. Clearly, most of gnome  
> applications don't
> obey this rule. Why does it happen?

The reason isn't a good one, but it's the reason nonetheless -- at the  
time, we just weren't able to agree on how to implement the Undo  
functionality.  (Somebody should just have put their foot down and  
said "this is how we're going to do it", but we weren't so good at  
that in those days.)

Some people (including me) wanted a simple Revert button beside the  
Close button, which would basically do the same as Cancel in an Ok/ 
Cancel dialog but without closing the dialog.  Others wanted a more  
fine-grained Undo solution, enabling you to undo one change at a  
time.  And yet others wanted a 'Defaults' button so that if you messed  
up, you could revert the settings to their default values.

<http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95110>

This is clearly something we ought to revisit and rectify for GNOME 3.0.

Cheeri.
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems