Re: [Usability] HIG: File New/Open/Quit, etc.

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 01:00 +0000, Steve Fosdick wrote:
[snip stuff about auto-saving because I think it's huge new adventure in
alternative UI that would just block us without ever being actually
done. At the least it shouldn't block this small incremental
improvement.]

> > > 1.1 File/New and File/Open should open new application windows (if not
> > > using tabs), if the current document is empty and unmodified.
> > 
> > Agreed, but "File" > "New" should do that regardless of whether the  
> > current document is empty and unmodified, right?
> 
> It would seem to make more sense to me that if the application has just
> been started and has created a blank document ready for editing that
> File/New be greyed/inactive until you edit the initial document.

I can imagine somebody wanting to start two empty documents at the same
time, and I can imagine them expecting to be able to do that via
File/New.

It's also wise to avoid graying UI out where possible, because it's
generally hard for the user to know _why_ it's grayed out.

[snip]
> The options are to attempt to guess what the user is trying to do, ask
> the user what he is trying to do or do one of these things consistently.

These are not mutually exclusive. You can do something by default and
offer the alternative before or after doing that.

[snip]
> For me "Quit" should be as I described above - quit the application.  If
> a document centred rather than application centred model is working well
> and quit is not required then it could indeed be removed.  This would be
> much less confusing than renaming it.
[snip]

Yeah. The only reason I can imagine that it could be OK is that
File/Quit doesn't work now anyway because most applications aren't
single-instance.

-- 
murrayc murrayc com
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