Re: An alternative proposal for instant-apply vs. non-instant-apply [amended]

[Adam Elman <aelman users sourceforge net>]

Just had a quick chat with Seth and wanted to amend/explain a couple 
of items here.

My main point: I think it's more important to discuss the behavior at 
this point than the button labels.  Please don't get caught up in the 
labeling just yet; we need to make a recommendation for _behavior_ 
above all, and secondarily what the buttons should actually say. 
Specifically, we need to decide where to draw the line between dialog 
boxes which should be instant-apply, and dialog boxes which should 
_not_ be instant-apply.

I probably should've just left button labels out, but then much of 
this wouldn't make sense.  But please keep that in mind.

At 10:57 AM -0700 9/6/01, Adam Elman wrote:
> 2) Object property dialogs which have immediate visual effects (say, 
> a style editor in a GNOME word processor or an object properties 
> dialog in GIMP or Dia) should be instant-apply.  They should not 
> have any buttons controlling the window: instead, the user should 
> simply use the standard WM close box or a "close window" menu option 
> to close the dialog, and the standard Undo command to undo actions 
> (which ideally should have an infinite chain).  If there is no Edit 
> menu with Undo available in the application, an "Undo" button should 
> probably be present, although only if it has a reasonable number of 
> Undo levels (i.e. more than 1).

By "object property dialog" I mean a dialog box which affects an 
object which is part of a document.  My point here is that the "Undo" 
function associated with the _document_ -- in the Edit menu on the 
document window, for instance -- should suffice to undo changes made 
by this kind of dialog.

I think that program preferences which are _not_ associated with 
objects in documents (and which therefore might have an "Undo" 
button) actually belong under category #3, and might therefore belong 
as non-instant-apply dialogs for consistency's sake, unless we can 
come up with a better place to draw the line between the two.

[#3]

> I propose that the buttons in this case should be "[Revert] [Apply] 
> [Apply & Close]".  If "Apply" is clicked, "[Apply & Close]" should 
> change to "[Close]".

Seth hates "[Revert]" for legitimate reasons; an appropriate 
alternative would be "[Cancel]", although Cancel also has the side 
effect of closing the dialog box.  Anyway, the point is to figure out 
which dialogs should or should not be instant-apply; we can figure 
out the details of the button labels later.  I just wanted to mention 
it in case some folks get hung up on it.

Adam
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