Re: [Usability] Modified Documents

[markus hammer <hm sabotage at>]

On Fri, 2004-09-17 at 09:09 -0400, Boris Goldowsky wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-09-17 at 12:09 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> > Your comments make me think that the Status bar would be a more
> > approrpriate place to put an Icon indicating Read Only status.
> 
> Why not adopt the NeXT & Mac OS X practice of putting a mark inside or
> over the 'close window' control?  It makes sense because if you are
> about to close a document window, that's the moment you need to be
> reminded that it has been modified.

all that comes to my mind is eye candy. 
i ask myself if benign applications would even let you close the program
without popping up a dialog: "The document you are working on has been
modified, do you want to save it before closing the application ?" - or
similar, or even let you do any changes inside the document when its
read only. all this stuff belongs on the application side of the system,
and absolutely not into the window manager.

what sure is good - to have a clear statement if a file is (read-only)
or (modified), no cryptic letters or even icons. if someone is using
small window bars due to small screen resolution - thinking of putting
an icon there is the same failure as using a cryptic * sign. as both may
end up being similar in size.

m hammer