Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Calum Benson wrote:
> Actually, in most well-designed interactive applications, there are very
> few cases where a dialog offering *no* choices should appear

On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 01:02:58PM +0000, Lloyd Wood wrote:
> 'You've got Mail!'

Lloyd, I don't know about you, but any mailer that brings up a
window saying I have mail and makes me press a button every few
minutes is going to get uninstalled pretty quickly.

A beep is maybe OK, I prefer a silent update.

If it's giong to say, "a mail message has arrived", it had
bloody well better say who it's from and have buttons like
    read..., delete..., autoreply
    [x] don't alert me about mail from this user any more
    [x] don't alert me about mail to gnome-devel-list any more

That might be OK for people who get fewer than a dozen messages a day.

(one of my favourite gui mailers is still Sun's open look Mailtool;
 perhaps it's very dated now, and the pushpins, wilst excellent,
 don't gibe with gnome too well, but if it ever became free I'd
 probably think hard about using it.  And you could tell it what to
 do when new mail arrove - beep n times, flash n times etc.).


Sometimes my Win98 system pops up a dialogue with no title bar and
no message, just an OK button.  It took me a long time to work out
that it was coming from a scanner test, and was telling me that a
piece of software had finished looking for the scanner I wasn't
using, and was ready to do something I didn't need to do that day.
At first I assumed it was a virus.

It's possible a more unixy approach to messages would be to have a
scrolling log of them, with buttons and links embedded in the log
to start applications, see more info etc.  This could be done with
mozilla, e.g. something like XMLTerm.

But that's getting a long way from, "don't bother me, computer",
which I think is the biggest problem with single-button dialogues.
It's what _I_ want to do, not what the softare wants me to do,
that interests me.  I want a slave crouching ready to obey my
every whim in silent obedience, not a butler with a lobotomy.

Lee


-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999