Re: Why modal dialogs are not movable?

[Gabriel Rossetti <rossetti gabriel gmail com>]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

On 4 April 2013 17:46, Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika yahoo com> wrote:

> Could you give a case where the user would be hindered from doing their
> work because the modal dialog can be moved independently of the parent
> window?

users tend to lose the modal dialog in the window stack, and if they
manage to switch away from the window that is currently blocked by a
modal dialog (because they need to look at something else, or because
of an accidental key press) the dialog will not be attached to the
window any more, and the application will look like it's stuck — which
usually leads to the user trying to close the application, or killing
it, with potential loss of data. it's something that's easy to verify
when doing user testing, regardless of the proficiency of the user.

it also makes sense from a visual perspective: a modal dialog is
blocking the window to which it's attached, so it should be visually
connected to the window that spawned it.

there's a greater question pertaining the overall abuse of modal
dialogs in GUI applications; usually, modality is neither needed nor
warranted, but it's not something that can be fixed outside of the
applications themselves.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

I would argue fix modal dialogs to be modal to the window (so they can't be "lost") and let a user move them around... In Windows, as much as I hate it, they have movable dialogs that are still modal to the window they are attached to and when you switch to another window and then switch back they are still modal to their window, why can't we do that? I really don't think the MacOSX way is better because it hides useful info. The problem with Gnome and/or Linux in general is that modal dialogs where not really modal, they were like regular pop-up windows and they could get "lost". If you fix that then everyone is happy.

Cheers,
Gabriel