Re: Comments on dialog proposal

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 06Sep2001 11:47AM (-0400), Liam Quin wrote:
> 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.

It's a serious problem that it takes several minutes. Certainly it
should not delay the UI for longer than it takes to redraw the visible
part of the document; everything else can be done in the background.
 
> 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 do a lot of my work on a 300MHz G3 which is a fair bit slower than a
300 MHz Pentium II. I've never had trouble waiting for settings to
apply.

There's damn few preferences where changing them is at all
computationally intensive, and those can either be special-cased, or
fixed.

Don't design the common case based on corner cases.
 
> 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.

It hardly matters unless the colors you are changing are those for the
dialog itself, in which case, you would never get to the black on
black state because you'd see that you are screwing yourself. You'd
change one color to a different value, change the other to the final
state, and change the first one back. Or you could have a swap button.
 
But again, this is a corner case. Most of the time, I'd like to see
the colors reflected immediately as I drag around the color
controls. It's hard to tell just from a little color chit what the
actual result will be on my screen, and that often results in multiple
trips through several dialogs to get things to look close to the way I
want. 

> 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?

Like Seth said, preference dialogs _should not have_ settings that
are unsafe. An OK button is no excuse for an unsafe setting.

Regards,

Maciej