Re: [Usability] close icon is misleading

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 10:54, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 15:27, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> 
> > How about "OK" or something similar? "Finished" maybe?
> 
> Hmm, I don't think we could use "OK"; the way things are right now, we
> effectively use "OK" to indicate that a dialog is not instant apply, and
> "Close" to indicate that it is.  Something like "Finished" or "Done" is
> a possibility I guess, although it could feel slightly odd if you hadn't
> actually made any changes before dismissing the window.
> 
> > Yes, but Windows nor MacOS have icons on the "Close" buttons.
> 
> That's true, I'd forgotten about the "X" icon on our Close buttons...
> that adds to the confusion with the "X" button in the titlebar alright. 
> There are still campaigns afoot to banish icons from dialog buttons
> though so maybe that will solve that particular problem :)

Consider me part of the freedom fighters to banish those that wish to
banish icons on dialog buttons. :) Oh, I also forgot to mention that
in OSX, they just banished dialog buttons, so that to close the dialog,
you need to click the little pearl that changes into a perl with an
engraved X when you hover on it, to close the dialog (iirc). I'm also
against this behaviour also. To use the mouse to close the dialog, this
means you need to move a greater distance, since after scrolling through
a dialog, your pointer is likely to be near the bottom of the window.

> > I know none of my machines have Floppy Disk drives anymore. My new
> > laptop doesn't even have a CD-ROM drive.
> 
> Yep, changed times indeed.  I'd be more than happy to see us
> experimenting with new icons for things like "Save" and the desktop
> device icons (how many users know what the inside of a hard disk looks
> like for goodness sake?), any takers? :)  

Yeah, I'm just having trouble coming up with better metaphors, that make
some kind of sense, in the parlance of our times. :)

> Longer term of course, you're right, it would be nice to be able to do
> away with the notion of explicitly "saving" things at all... PDAs have
> managed to do it quite happily for years.

True. True.

-- dobey