Re: [HIG] Capplet buttons/guidelines

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Gregory Merchan wrote:

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

Well, every one I've used, certainly; I'm sure I could point you at
examples of "Close" buttons in Windoze, CDE, Mac and Amiga dialogs. 
Their respective styleguides don't give much guidance on when to use it,
admittedly (and perhaps for good reason), but it is at least mentioned
in the Windoze one-- I don't have the others to hand to check.

> 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.

They may well have been, but do we/jrb have time to solve them on GNOME
in time for 2.0...?  (Not a question I'd care to ask in an ideal world,
ditto your valid point about usability testing, but tempus is fidgeting
and people have desktops to deliver...)

> Place the button as just an icon someplace in the window other
> than the bottom left corner; reserve the labelled Help button for dialogs

Okay, so now we have three different ways of representing the same
command-- menu item in an app window, standard button in a dialog, and
different-looking button again in whatever part of an implicit-apply
dialog it happens to fit.  Isn't one of the fundamental rules of UI
design "don't design new controls to do jobs for which there already
exist perfectly good ones"?

> 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.)

>   +-----------+
>   | _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".
>   +--------+

Okay, that works here... how would we do "reset" in a regular properties
dialog?  I did suggest to jrb that maybe the Help and Defaults/Reset
button could be icon-only buttons in the bottom left of the dialog, but
neither of us were completely convinced.  (But if we did do something
like that, why should it be any different in a capplet?)

Anyway, cutting through all the thrust and counter-thrust in the three
emails to date, I think there are basically two points here that there's
some disagreement on:

1. An instant-apply dialog is a window, not a dialog;
2. Capplets shouldn't necessarily look/behave the same as any other
properties/prefs window in any other application.

Would I be right?

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