Re: property dialogs

[famrom ran es (Guillermo S. Romero / unnamed / Familia Romero)]

>I think all the changes.  If I make a bunch of edits on different
>pages, I only want to press "OK" once.

Then I vote for the local and global combo approach. Two rows of buttons,
one for local, other for global. Local ones inside notebook page. Global
outside, using the window frame.

+-----------------+
|  ___  ___  ___  |
| /   \/___\/___\ |
| |             | |
| |             | |
| |             | |   ## a button
| |             | |
| |     L ## ## | | <- Local (L is a message saying "Local" or "This page")
| +-------------+ |
|   ##  G ## ##   | <- Global (G is "Global" or "All pages" text)
+-----------------+
    ^- Global only buttons, like Close.

By this way anybody can do anything. Global only approach means that you
must remember what you have done in other pages, and local only means that
you have to do lots of clicks. Both have problems.

IMHO, here, additional buttons will be usefull (and not a waste of space).
And with messages, both rows of buttons can be a "copy" (same text inside,
no "foo" "foo all").

IMO Apply, Undo and Help should be in both lines (doing different things, of
course).

Close/Done should be global only (it closes the window, but you must click
Apply before). Some feedback to the user (a light or a "You have not applied
things, close and lose changes?") will be necesary.

Help could be placed or "global only" (help browser autoselects the info
related to the active page) or "local only" (you hit, and get help for that
page) or both (you choose which one to hit, one shows global info about the
window, the other about the page). To keep the trend with Apply and Undo, I
think that two help buttons will be OK (sorry to the help writers, they will
have to write sections for each page (details of each page) and for the
group (an index, where the global purpouse of the window is explained)).

Some complexity maybe usefull sometimes (I believe (hope) that users are
smart, and if they are not... they should be happy to learn more things). ;]

The important thing is that all, repeat *all*, windows follow the same rule
(using the same widget). We all know places (OS) where there are no rules,
and you end insane. 8^P

GSR