Re: [Usability] close icon is misleading

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 08:44, Calum Benson wrote:
> Having said that, within the constraints of the current UI guidelines 
> (i.e. without removing the big "Close" button, which is a different
> debate), what can we do any better to indicate that it will both close
> the window and keep the settings, and that if it didn't keep them, it
> would be labelled "Cancel" instead?  The only thing I can think of is
> some tooltip ugliness... I suspect this might be one of those things
> that people will just have to learn. 

How about "OK" or something similar? "Finished" maybe?

> (It's not a particularly new concept at least, Windows and Macintosh
> both use Close buttons to mean the same thing as GNOME does-- just not
> as widely, in the case of Windows.)

Yes, but Windows nor MacOS have icons on the "Close" buttons. All in
all, the metaphor is broken (as are many other classical metaphors that
are used throughout the computing workspace, such as "Save"). If we
can't use some other icon, or wording, perhaps we need to look at all of
the metaphors for the words/icons that we are using, and fix somet of
them. I know none of my machines have Floppy Disk drives anymore. My new
laptop doesn't even have a CD-ROM drive.

-- dobey