Re: property dialogs

[Dirk Luetjens <dirk luedi oche de>]

Hello,

On Wed, 18 Mar 1998, Janos Farkas wrote:

> immediately.  Of course, for a few parameters like (smtp host, cache
> server, user name) make no particular sense to change *NOW*, but in this
> case, it could mean "for the next use".  GUI elements/colors/background
> pictures/font style changes also profit from "instant apply".
I use Khoros, an image processing software, form time to time. They
distinguish although between live and non-live entries in dialogs. For
live entries the append a little flash symbol behind the field. So you
know, that when you change this entry, this will be live change. 

I don't like this behavoir in general, because:  you will never know if
the action bound to this entry is rather time consuming or not. Consider a
vector based drawing application and a property dialog to change the style
of an object. Sure it will be a good feedback if the object changes its
properties immediatly, but when the object gets larger and the object will
be redrawn all the time when toggle through a list... 

This happens to me in Khoros all the time, when want to change two
paramters of an image filter. First the filter runs directly after i hit
return in the first entry and second, due to the run of the changed filter
a lot of other actions are started afterwards.

Dirk