Re: property dialogs

[Tom Tromey <tromey creche cygnus com>]

I read through all the property dialog replies tonight.  Thanks for
all the feedback.  I can't say it helped me reach any sort of
conlusion, but it did serve to illuminate the issues.

One thing I found particularly interesting:

[ Robert J. Slover ]
Robert> Tom, doesn't this suggest that the standard dialog UIs be
Robert> dynamically loaded libraries...or a CORBA invoked desktop
Robert> service?  If the people who care about this can reach a
Robert> consensus on the functionality and the API we can have
Robert> alternatives to suit different users.

This makes a lot of sense to me.  I'm not going to go the CORBA route
(or even the configurability route) in this first version, but I'll
certainly try to design the API (and typical usage) so that various
typical arrangements can be accomodated.

That way any interested party could at least add a config option and a
new style under the hood.


This idea neatly splits the problems into two parts:

1. What should the default GUI look like?

2. What model should we present?  This is really the important
question, because it affects the code we write in the applications.
Changing the model will be much harder than changing the buttons and
layout.


By "model" I basically mean the choice between "tweak and apply" and
"instant update".

So, if possible, I'd like to shift the focus of the discussion from
GUI details like button layout to the model we present.  My own
preference is for "tweak and apply".  Here are some thoughts on why I
prefer this.


In a past project we used instant update dialogs everywhere.  In many
cases, this was satisfactory.  But in some cases we didn't like it
very much.  For instance if a particular change was slow, you'd
frequently finding yourself wanting to make several changes and apply
them all at once instead of endlessly waiting for the last change to
take before you could attempt the next (in our case a change meant
re-rendering an image, which could be slow).

Also we found that some dialogs don't feel like instant update dialogs
to the user.  For instance, if you must type something, then you have
to press Return or something anyway, which feels different.  Or
suppose you are using a slider to change the mouse speed (a real
example).  Having this auto-update seems quite odd.


However, I'd still like to hear arguments both for and against either
model.


Another model-related question: should we bother with Undo?  How
exactly should the Undo button work?  How many levels of undo?  What
happens if you apply, close the dialog, and bring it back up again?
Etc.


I definitely think we should try to have property dialogs be
non-modal.  It really drives me nuts in Windows when I try to find
some information but first have to dismiss the property dialog (which
is the reason I went looking for this piece of info in the first
place).


So my own inclination is "tweak and apply", with the default GUI being
Tim Small's "Apply/Apply+Close/Close" buttons.  I agree that these are
less confusing than "OK/Apply/Cancel".

Tom