Re: "Undo" button in capplets

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On 10/04/07 19:28, Denis Washington wrote:
[...]
> > Then there would doubtless be people who would want a Redo button to
> > counter the Undo button, so they could quickly toggle between 'before'
> > and 'after' states to see the effect.  A not unreasonable request, but
> > it would lead to pretty cluttered dialogs.  
>
> It doesn't necessarily have to look cluttered:
> http://ultimum-projekt.de/mockups/test.png

It doesn't look cluttered, but I can't help feeling the work-to-benefit 
and/or complexity-to-benefit ratios are probably a bit unbalanced. A 
feature like this will require a lot of ground work, for something only 
likely to be used a very small proportion of the time.

However, I'm not going to stop you if you have the time to implement a 
nice static library we can share between the capplets! While we're at 
it, I'd like to suggest we move away from the "Dialog Window" approach 
to capplets. I think a dialog window will forever be associated with the 
explicit apply model, and we really need to re-enforce the idea that 
these settings are instant apply. If you look at some of the control 
center interfaces in various operating systems that use instant apply, 
none of them have any buttons at the bottom of the window. Dialog 
windows are a "request for action" (hence the name), where as our 
capplets do not have any sort of request or dialogue with the user. What 
do people think about this? I think it's potentially something that 
could be added to the HIG, under the instant apply section, to clarify 
what type of windows "Preference Windows" are.

Regards,

Thomas