Re: [Usability] HIG Clarification for "Close Without Saving" button

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:

> Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 13:55:40 -0500
> From: Liam R. E. Quin <liam holoweb net>
> To: Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>
> Cc: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] HIG Clarification for "Close Without Saving"
>     button
>
> On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 10:56 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 11:41, Patrick Costello wrote:
> > > Therefore, the label in the original message would be:
> > > "Close Without Saving".
> > I'd be happy to update the HIG to reflect that, too.  Although as it
> > happens I prefer "Don't Save" anyway (contraction and all)-- if it's
> > good enough for the Mac... :)
>
> The right question, I think, is, "what choices does the user need?"
>
> Consider quitting an application and getting the message,
> "You have several documents open and one or more has
> unsaved changes"
> Stupid computer! *WHICH* documents have unsaved changes? Tell me!

Yup it is annoying.  Although I am the kind of user who opens more than
fifty application windows at a time.

I suspect that ordinary users particularly ordinary Gnome users do not
have the same problems of having many documents with unsaved changes open
as I believe they are more likely to only have two or three documents
open.  (And to be honest I tend dot open many windows when I'm viewing
rather than editing things, when I'm editing I dont believe I keep very
many unsaved documents open at a time if I can avoid it).

The one important point I want to make is that even if we want to look at
the case of many unsaved documents being open it would still be useful to
have a standard dialog for when only one unsaved document is open.

(When - like most in most Gnome applications - you are using SDI and treat
each window as a seperate document and only have the option to Close and
no button for Quit you have no choice but to deal with the one document in
question).

> So now I want to go through each document in turn to see if I need
> to save the changes.
>
> The dialogue, then, might usefully be --
>
> There are five documents open with unsaved changes.
> [ ] throw away all my work and quit anyway
> [ ] I pressed quit by mistake, sorry, I know I'm stupid
> [ ] close the documents you can, and I'll work on the others
> [ ] show me a list of open documents so I can see what to do

Try quitting the GIMP 2.2 with several modified but unsaved documents
open, they have an interesting attempt at solving this seperate problem.

> Another approach is "direct editing" in which changes are applied
> instantly to the on-disk document.  Gnome already has this in some
> areas -- some preferences/settings boxes use the "instant apply"
> paradigm, although this greatly increases the importance of the
> undo mechanism.

There is a long dicussion on the desktop-devel list roughly about this
approach.  While I admire the concept it would still be worth while in the
short term to provide a standard Save Confirmation Dialog.  It is a
relatively simple task which I hope could be done in time for the next
version of GTK and treated seperately from more ambitious long term goals
like a "Auto Save" or "Zero save" system.


To change the subject slightly:
Who do I need to talk to about adding a GTK_STOCK_DISCARD?
Irrespective of what label we use, be it "Close without saving", "Don't
Save" or "Discard" I dont think anyone can disagree that we want to be
able to have the same label used consistantly.

- Alan H.