[Usability] Button Layout in Dialogs, vertical button bar on the right?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

I've been playing around Adobe Photoshop and various other programs and
noticed that quite a few of them place their dialog buttons on the right
hand side of a dialog, in a vertical button bar.  I was thinking that if
done carefully and consistently a developer could accomodate users who
prefer that layout by programmatically moving the buttons from a
horizontal row at the bottom of the dialog to vertical column on the right
hand side.

I have long wondered if user interface designs get flipped around to
accomodate the writing direction of the local culture.  My suspicion is
that this doesn't happen and that there is not much infrastructure in
place to make it easy to do this kind of systematic rearraranging.

The layout with buttons on the right hand side seems to make better use of
the available screen width.  Some user interface designs like the
gnome-theme-manager and various Find and Replace dialogs seem to end up
using this kind of layout, putting buttons in a row on the right hand side
rather than at the bottom, without it necessarily being completely
intentional. I'm wondering if anyone can think of any justifcations for
using this kind of layout and when it might be acceptable.

Any thoughts?

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

P.S.  Anyone know of an easy to use key logger or click counter, something
like to gather data on my own usage patterns?  If there was something I
could compile into my applications to gather usage data I might be
interested to give that a try but in the short term I'm just looking for
something simple, a step up from the odometer panel applet.