Re: Comments on dialog proposal

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 01:18:15PM +0100, colin z robertson wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 03:57:43PM -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> The fact that it is in the toolbar rather than in a dialog conveys to
> me a message that it will instant-apply. The Apply button in a dialog
> serves two purposes: Applying the changes, and allowing the user to
> delay applying the changes until they want to.

Note that the Font selection in Word's style editor does *not* apply
until you choose all relevant settings and press OK.

Which is just as well, because generally you want to change several
settings -- font family, italic/bold, size, kerning, etc -- and formatting
a large document can take several minutes.

Not all of us have brand spaking new Macintosh G4 systems. Maciej :-) and
in any case I'd like GNOME to be usable on a 300MHz pentium II with 128M
of RAM.  (In fact I'd like it to work on something far lower-end, and
perform OK, but that's already unlikely I think.)

I think that the idea of instant-apply dialogues comes from a confusion
between direct manipulation of data and indirect manipulation of metadata.

Certainly I don't want desktop themes changing until I press OK -- not
only is it far from instant, but until neither pixmap nor engine-based
themes (either gtk or wm) ever crash window manager / gtk / control-centre,
and until you can change themes in under 10 seconds (under 3 seconds would
be better), this feature would make me start editing ~/.gtkrc instead of
using the control centre.

As for colour choices, if you are trying to change from green text on a
black background to black text on a green background, no, I don't want to
have an intermediate state of black-on-black or green-on-green.

I *like* the idea that a dlog box is a safe playgruond.  One of things that
helped the Mac gain acceptance was that it was very tolerant of "random
clicking".  Unlike X, which features "click-ahead" and where apps often
lack undo.  Let's not make gnome unsafe for beginners, OK?

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Core staff contact, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001