Re: [HIG] Capplet buttons/guidelines

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 05:26:06PM +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> 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.

I'll look too. I don't recall any guidelines that address it at all.

> > 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...)

I'll see what I can do. (Probably some glade 1.x files. I already have one.)


> > 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"?

This is not a new control; it's a button. Placing it on the top-right corner
puts it in a position near that of the Help menu, which is of course not
present in this case. This is what I've seen on my sister's Mac, btw.


> > 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?)

Group it with the other buttons certainly. The OS/2 notebooks placed the
buttons on the page like:

(just showing the bottom left corner, not the tabs or the rest of the window)

|
|
| [ _Undo ] [ _Default ] [ _Help ]
|
|                                         <-- This space provided by page-
|                                             turning buttons and the graphic
+---------------------------------------      for page stacks.

The extra space and that this is on a notebook page are the cues that these
 are not dialog buttons.

What we're looking at are 6 possible dialog buttons:

 1. OK      - Accept everything as shown and close the window.
 2. Cancel  - Reject all changes and close the window.
 3. Apply   - Accept everything as shown
 4. Undo    - Reject all changes
 5. Default - Restore factory settings.
 6. Help    - Help

Since this is madness, I'm looking at what needs to be done for instant-apply.


> 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;

I say if it is instant-apply it is a view of something and not a dialog.

> 2. Capplets shouldn't necessarily look/behave the same as any other
> properties/prefs window in any other application.

I say capplets and all object (includes applications) property views
should the same (modulo particulars, of course).

> Would I be right?

That there is disagreement, I think so. I wish not.


We need guidelines, perhaps in the controls section, to what instant applies
the settings for particular widgets. I was changing theme with the combo box
in sawfish-ui and the theme changed as I moved over the combo box drop down
list. This produced many many errors and eventually I had to switch to a vt
to kill the client.


> 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,
Greg Merchan