Re: [Usability] Instant Apply Windows

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 03:00:33PM -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > Well this is another thing about PonG.  Revert comes for free.  It took me
> > about 10 minutes to implement in PonG actually, making it the easiest feature
> > of PonG.  This is one of the reasons I think we should use pong.  We could
> > also perhaps do a right click menu which could do things like "revert to
> > factory defaults" and such stuff.  All without having to code all that.  PonG
> > can do it quite simply and correctly.  Perhaps revert could be on a right
> > click menu as well.
> 
> Hi George,
> 
> I think Undo would be nicer and more familiar to users than a
> monolithic Revert. How about adding an Undo feature that undoes
> settings one at a time? You could even make it remember the Undo chain
> even when the dialog is closed, allowing users to undo fuckups at an
> arbitrary later point in time. Also, you could make Ctrl+Z undo even
> if there is no Undo button. Undo would really be a killer PonG
> feature.

It would actually not be hard at all.  The data types are limited and easy
to handle in gconf and so it's fairly simple (and cheap resource wise) to do
this.  Not as simple as revert which is truly trivial, but simple enough with
gconf.

Of course first I (or someone else if anyone's up to it) must port it to
gnome2.  I think it would be a good addition and could really also replace
the control center at some point, as 'capplets' could just be pong xml files,
all you have to do is install a handler for them in nautilus, and voila,
you've got a control center.

One advantage here is that PonG is not frozen for gnome2, and so we can play
with it for a while longer.  Perhaps integrating better with glade if
neccessary (I think for most things it's even needed).  The idea is that it
can get all these things correct without any fuss from the app writer.  And
so that we can have consistently working preference dialogs with a
potentially rich set of features (such as undo or revert), perhaps hidden by
some disclosure triangle as seems to be in-vogue currently, or just as
keyboard shortcuts.

In addition, a sysadmin can easy restrict the changes that people can make
through the gui by just editting the pong file with pong-edit.

OK, enough plugging pong...

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
                       -- Otto von Bismarck