Re: modal dialogs etc.



On Fri, 5 Oct 2001, Jody Goldberg wrote:

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 05:36:38PM -0400, Allin Cottrell wrote:
In current gnumeric if you invoke anything modal, the entire program
in the background gets "greyed out" until the modal task is completed.

In my opinion this is a desirable behaviour for modal operations.
Admittedly it would be nice to have fewew modal operations, but for
those that do make sense I'd rather be honest with the user and
tell them that the commands on the menu are disabled, rather than
silectly ignoring them as MS does.

I don't have anything against a bit of modality, as such.  But
gnumeric is sort of out on a limb in dimming the whole app whenever
the user is doing something modal.  It's not just MS that "silently
ignores" forbidden mouse-clicks.  Cf. mozilla, abiword, etc, etc.
IMO it's a matter of "honesty" versus what the user is likely to
expect.  I know that newbies often have trouble with modality --
"Why's this menu not working??" -- but I'm not sure that visually
disabling everything is going to help much.

Allin Cottrell.





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