Re: [Usability] What happened to Undo?

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Sat, 2003-06-07 at 09:47, Gregory Merchan wrote:

> Describing what Undo affects as a "micro-change" gives me cause to worry.

Well, that was just my off-the-top-of-my head description, to
distinguish between "the last thing you changed in the dialog" and
"everything you just changed in the dialog".  Many apps treat a dialog
transaction as a single entity... e.g. in Word, if you tweak a bunch of
settings in the Paragraph dialog, close the dialog, then select Undo,
everything you just changed in the dialog is Undone, not just the last
value you changed.  (That's another one of my qualms about using Undo in
dialogs I guess, what Edit->Undo should do after you've closed a dialog
isn't too clear to me).

> Do we not have a better description of what Undo and Redo should do?

Unfortunately not, probably because none of the core GNOME apps really
implement Undo right now so we didn't think it was a high priority :/

> As I recall, we shouldn't have any unstable setting states. I'm at a loss
> to think of how they might occur. 

They shouldn't, provided sets of interdependent settings (e.g. a Proxy
name and Port field) are made explicit apply as the HIG suggests, and
Undone together.  This doesn't seem to be happening in various places
right now, though, e.g. the Network Preferences dialog.  If I've changed
both the Proxy and Port fields, pressing Undo some amount of times could
leave the application in a non-working state, whereas pressing Defaults
or Revert never would (provided respectively that the default settings
worked, and the current settings worked when you opened the dialog, of
course).

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems