Re: Modeless dialogs in the shell (design and implementation)

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 2:55 PM, William Jon McCann
<william jon mccann gmail com> wrote:
> Hi Giovanni,
>
> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 10:33 AM, Giovanni Campagna
> <scampa giovanni gmail com> wrote:
>> Current design [1] reads that all dialog not related to applications are
>> "system dialogs" and thus should be handled modally by gnome-shell.
>>
>> While this works for some of them, in particular for
>> shutdown/restart/logoff, for others, like bluetooth auth/pairing or
>> PolicyKit, it is wrong from a design point of view, IHMO.
>>
>> Consider PolicyKit for example: authentication requests should be opened
>> in the background and only be modal for the application that needs them,
>> so that I can launch a privileged task while doing something else at the
>> same time.
>
> What applications are you thinking of here?  Why would it be useful to
> have a blocking authentication request in the background?  I don't see
> the advantage there.

Replying to myself here. :)

I've started to do some investigation of how we are using dialogs in
GNOME today.  I've put up a bunch of information here:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/SystemDialogs/Compatibility

We can really use some help in tracking down and filling in this
information.  Particularly the "Use of dialogs" column.

If you have any questions feel free to poke me on IRC too.

Thanks,
Jon