Re: [HIG] Capplet buttons/guidelines

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Gregory Merchan wrote:

> This is not a new control; it's a button. 

As you described it, though, it's different from the Help button that
appears in a regular dialog, in that it doesn't have a text label. 
Indeed, if the user had icons in command buttons turned off, as I do,
they would look completely different.

> 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.

Hmm, is that OSX?  Help buttons always appear in the bottom left corner
of windows on my Mac, but admittedly that's only OS 8.6...

> 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

Wasn't the point of an "Undo" button to reject only the last change you
made in the dialog?  Otherwise its use becomes inconsistent with
document-level undo.  (That was how I understood the last discussion we
had about this, anyway).

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

Okay, then I guess we're making the same distinction as Windows (say)
makes between dialogs and property inspectors. (But not Windows'
property sheets, which *are* just regular dialogs, and much more widely
used).  

The difference in Windows is that property inspectors have different
window decorations, looking more like torn-off toolbars than dialogs. 
And they don't make any provision for Cancel, Undo, or Help (other than
by pressing F1), which seems to limit their usefulness as a
fully-fledged GUI for changing properties.  Which indeed they're not,
that's what Windows' property sheets are for.

I guess my big concern is how to get all the peripheral functionality we
need in a generic properties dialog into a window with no menubar and no
buttons-- I haven't seen OS/2 or later versions of MacOS, but this
certainly hasn't been achieved on MacOS 8 by any stretch of the
imagination.  But you seem to be working on that, so I'll reserve
judgment :o)

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

Well, it sounds like you and I agree on that particular point, at least
:o)

> 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.

Yuck....

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