Re: Comments on dialog proposal

[Kai Willadsen <kaiw csee uq edu au>]

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> > Furthermore, Apple are not infallible. I can see plenty of potential
> > problems with instant-apply dialogs, and not a whole lot of
> > advantages. So why do we want them to become the norm?
> What problems do you see with them? I imagined a whole lot before
> trying it, but having used them in Nautilus and OS X I think they work
> great.


Sitting here, looking at the gnome control center, I can see many 
current configuration options in which instant-apply has the potential 
to be quite damaging. The most obvious ones are window manager 
configuration (as in, changing the current WM) and the metatheme 
capplet. I have witnessed X crashes caused by changing WMs (usually with 
enlightenment or similar), and the current metatheme setup means that 
you cannot ever retrieve your *current* theme, unless it is also a 
metatheme. One further issue is those situations where instant-apply is 
not possible. Again, looking at the current control center, the "Look 
and Feel->Applications" section springs to mind. At the moment (I am 
using gnome 1.4-ximian), all of these changes will only take effect when 
an application is restarted. Unless gtk-2.0 will change this, this means 
that you have inconsistencies in when the instant-apply is actually instant.

The other objection to instant-apply is that saying 'oh - you can just 
go and change the settings back to what they were' implies that the 
users *know* what the settings were. Some of the standard configuration 
options tend to be quite complex, making reverting settings is a fairly 
important feature.

> The advantage to instant-apply is that it makes it really easy to
> tweak multiple settings to taste. 


Which sounds great, until you realise that the majority of the user 
population is going to do more harm than good via tweaking.

> It also removes unnecessary
> complexity - there is no real reason why it should take an extra
> button press in addition to just changing the control to make the
> setting take effect. Imagine, for instance, a font selection drop down
> in a word processing program's toolbar. It would be crazy if you had
> to press an Apply or OK button to get that font selection to take
> effect, wouldn't it?


Yes, but then a font selection can (usually) be undone, and is very 
unlikely to be damaging. Nevertheless, I have witnessed people get 
*very* frustrated at trying to find the font they were previously using 
in a list of 100+ fonts. "So, were you using 'courier (abisource)', 
'courier (adobe)', 'courier (bitstream)', 'courier (urw)', 'courier new 
(abisource)' or 'courier new (monotype)'. Okay, so that's extreme, but 
still...

Kai Willadsen

ps. First post to this list, so apologies if I'm out of line.