Re: [Usability] online/offline design

[Matthew Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

Luis Villa wrote:
> On 5/19/05, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:
> ...
> > There are also cases where failing (more or less) silently is preferable
> > too, of course... I'm sure we've all been annoyed by mail programs that
> > pop up alerts during their periodic background checks to tell us that
> > they can't connect to the mail server, when we really couldn't care
> > less.  
>
> Absolutely. I'd /hope/ that the dialog I proposed elsewhere in the
> thread would only be deployed in response to user-initiated actions-
> having evo remind me over and over again that my network is down is of
> course a bug, no matter how nice/informative the dialog is.
> ...

In that case, this would be HIG-compliant --
 __________________________________________
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|                                          |
| (-)  Foo could not bar, because there is |
|      no network connection.              |
|                                          |
|                 ( Try Again ) ((  OK  )) |
|__________________________________________|

-- where Foo is the name of the program, and bar-ing is what you just 
asked it to do.

As others have suggested, though, it would be much preferable to 
deactivate the buttons and menu items that could produce this alert 
whenever you're offline. A computer shouldn't invite you to tell it to 
do something when it knows darn well that the thing is impossible.

--
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/