Re: [HIG] Capplet buttons/guidelines

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 12:02:49PM +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> > Instant apply:
> > 
> > * No buttons if it's coming up inside the control-center window.
> > 
> > * Just a [Close] button (or maybe [Done]) if the capplet is coming up
> > in a separate window.
> 
> I'm sure Greg will have something to say about that :)

(I should start my own name-invocation Internet cult. ;-)

As has been said a million times before: Close what?
As has been said a million times before: "I think it's clear that it's the
                                          dialog [or alert] window."
(Visualize "Is not" "Is too" repeated many times)
As has been said a million times before: Let's do user testing.

Yet unsaid, afaik: And what UI on earth other than GNOME uses this?

The million-times objection doesn't hold for "Done", but this is for
instant-apply windows (Replying here to Calum, who snipped that part).
Instant-apply windows should not be regarded as, indeed are not, dialogs
and so they shouldn't look like them.

> > * Just an [Apply] button if it's coming up inside the control-center
> > window.
> > 
> > * [Save] and [Cancel] buttons if it's coming up in a separate window
> > (you're saving the settings).
> 
> "Save" usually saves things to a user-specified file, I don't think we
> want to use that term IMHO.  And this means capplets and any other
> random properties/preferences dialog are using significantly different
> buttons, despite the fact they're doing exactly the same thing.

This is about the explicit-apply section. Simple answer, use instant-apply.
Most, if not all [cliche], of the problems that we've considered with
instant-apply have already been solved in at least two interfaces, MacOS and
OS/2.

> > Help can be a menu item, since the control center window already has a
> > menu bar with a help menu. The help feature is rearely used and
> > needlessly clutters up the main button area.
> 
> This is a good point, although I might argue that Help might be rather
> more often used if there was an explicit help button right there in the
> dialog-- you're not trying to tell me people aren't using help because
> they're just not confused by any of the options in any of our capplets
> :)

Yadda, yadda, . . . let's go instant-apply - no dialog, ergo no dialog-style
help button. Place the button as just an icon someplace in the window other
than the bottom left corner; reserve the labelled Help button for dialogs
to provide further distinction and for when no other corner can be used. It
can probably be done so that it doesn't change the rest of the layout when
the capplet is viewed within the control center. (Though I can't say I see
a good reason to continue with that.)

> > Since I omitted any kind of revert feature, this means that the
> > capplets have to be designed to make settings easy to change back by
> > hand. 
> 
> Which means what?  It's nearly always easy enough to change them back by
> hand, the problem is remembering what the value was before, as most
> people don't go to the trouble of remembering.

Yup. OS/2 had an Undo button in its property notebooks (I don't know what Mac
does). It also had a Default button. When these were applicable they were
placed on the page of the property notebook. There were other visual cues
such that the row of buttons did not look like the row of buttons on a dialog.

Basically the notebook looked bound like a spiral-bound notebook in
meatspace and some lines were drawn to make the pages look stacked.

> > If this is too hard in some cases, I would rather see a proper
> > "Undo" feature than a monolithic revert.
> 
> I thought we agreed in the previous discussion that "Undo" should only
> be used for changes that affected a document, not dialog-level changes? 
> (And then we'd still end up with the same number of buttons we had
> before anyway).

Because I'm a crazy fiend, I'd probably make the control center look like a
folder. Each object, viewed as an icon in the folder, would have on it's menu
(i.e., the right-click menu or the menu from the folder menubar that applies
to selected objects) an item which would restore all the settings to
"factory defaults".  (I cooked up this scheme before I looked at that other
one with a Defaults button.)

Actually I'm so crazy, I made a little glade file. Since not all readers have
glade, and glade xml is not easy to read, here's a description:

The GNOME object, a.k.a., the control center:
+------------------------------------+
| _GNOME   _Selected   _View   _Help |
+------------------------------------+
|                                    |
|      A bunch o' icons              |
|      (i.e., the capplets)          |
|                                    |
+------------------------------------+

  Its menus:
  +--------+
  | _GNOME |
  +--------+-+
  | _Archive |      <-- Save the entire configuation
  | _Restore |      <-- Restore from a saved configuation
  +----------+

     (I thought about putting some session management interface here,
      but I'd not done that as of this writing.)

  +-----------+
  | _Selected |     <-- Applies to the selected object in a folder
  +--------+--+
  | _Open  |        <-- Just convenience in this case. (same as dbl-click)
  | _Reset |        <-- Resets whatever is selected to "factory defaults".
  +--------+

  +-------+
  | _View |
  +-------+---+     <-- I have no clue what this would do. Really.
  | (*) Icons |          No, come on. I mean it. Quit kidding around.
  | ( ) List  |          What does this do?
  +-----------+         Actually, I was thinking one more might be
                         appropriate: Tree. The view would be much like
                         that of the 1.x control center.

  +-------+
  | _Help |
  +-------++        <--  Ya know, it might be a good idea to have
  | _About |              fewer things like this.
  +--------+

Each item would have the same items as on the Selected menu in its right-click
 menu. The Selected menu is a convenience for:
   Accessibility
   People who can't right-click
   People who don't get the idea that right-clicking when some things are
      selected pops up a menu that applies to all the selected things
 It contains things that don't make sense on an Edit menu.

In the glade file there is a status bar on that window since I used the
GnomeApp widget. I don't know for what it might be used.

There are two other windows in the file. Both musings on how to handle
instant- vs. explicit-apply.

The explict-apply dialog: (Yuck)

+----------------------------------------------+
|+------------------------------------+______  |
||                                    |      \ |
||                                    | Foo  | |
||    [ The tabs are placeed          |______/ |
||       on the right in the hope     |      \ |
||       that this will make it       | Bar  | |
||       more obvious that OK,        |______/ |
||       and consequently the         |      \ |
||       other buttons, apply         | Quux | |
||       to the entire dialog. ]      |______/ |
||                                    |        |
||                                    |        |
||                                    |        |
|+------------------------------------+        |
|                                              |
| [  Help  ]            [ Cancel ] [[   OK   ]]|
+----------------------------------------------+

The instant-apply window, background image capplet showing.
(This would probably not be on a notebook page, that's just what
 I was working with at the time. Instant-apply, so tabs on top.)

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
|/-----\/-----\/------\                                         |
|| Foo || Bar || Quux |                                         |
|+-----++-----++------+----------------------------------------+|
|| +-------------------------------+                     [ ? ] ||
|| |                               |                           ||
|| |                               |                           ||
|| |           No Image            |                           ||
|| |                               |  (*) Tiled                ||
|| |                               |  ( ) Centered             ||
|| +-------------------------------+  ( ) Scaled               ||
||                                    ( ) Do not use an image  ||
|| [______________][v] [ Browse... ]                           ||
||                                                             ||
|| [                   Set the background now                ] ||
||                                                             ||
|| +-- Color Scheme -----------------------------------------+ ||
|| |          This color scheme is used when no image        | ||
|| |           is chosen or you do not use an image.         | ||
|| |                                                         | ||
|| |                  (*) Solid                              | ||
|| |                  ( ) Blend from top to bottom           | ||
|| |                  ( ) Blend from left to right           | ||
|| |                                                         | ||
|| |    Primary Color: [      (color picker thing)         ] | ||
|| |  Secontary Color: [      (color picker thing)         ] | ||
|| +---------------------------------------------------------+ ||
|+-------------------------------------------------------------+|
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

(Yes, that's one long button in the middle.)

Using something like this would probably mean that there's some
 reorganization done among the capplets.


> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> -- 
> CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
> http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771
> 
> Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

Cheers, craziness, and as little sleep as possible,
Greg Merchan