Re: gnome-stock pixmaps

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On 29 Apr 1998, Ben Darnell wrote:
> Actually, the criticism of Windows was mainly for the presence of both
> an apply button and an ok button, and a cancel button that may or may
> not reverse any changes made to the dialog.  Gnome dialogs should have
> three buttons: apply, close, and help.
> 

There's already a decision on this, it's one of the few areas where Gnome
apps are actually consistent, let's not break it. :)

If you write a Gnome program, it should use GnomePropertyBox, or something
so close the difference is imperceptible.

There are four buttons, with the following effects:

OK: Same as clicking Apply followed by Close.
Apply: Irrevocably apply changes.
Close: Close the dialog. Do not apply, do not revoke previous applies.
Help: Display help.

The reason for both an OK and Apply button is that most Gnome properties
dialogs are non-modal, so you can keep it open, apply, try out the
changes, apply something else, etc. If you don't want to keep it open,
OK is faster than clicking both Apply and Close. Both OK and Apply are
ghosted (is that an Amiga term? I mean insensitive in Gtk speak) until
some changes are applied. This makes it clear that both of them apply
changes.

That said, since all programs use GnomePropertyBox and they do not connect
to the OK button directly, it is trivial to compile your local copy with
no OK button or even no buttons at all and all apps should work. 
Configurability is one of the major advantages of standardization. 

There are still some problems with property-setting consistency; for
example, some apps have a "Save settings" option and others always save
settings. This should be fixed eventually... 

Havoc Pennington
http://pobox.com/~hp