Gnome's Dialogues

[James "Doc" Livingston]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 13:47 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> Gnome markets itself as an incredibly usable desktop, and I personally
> find it very productive and efficient to work on. However one thing
> which a friend of mine pointed out really startles me. Some dialogues
> have two buttons, one for cancelling and one for saving[1] (let's call
> that dialogue 1). The cancel button in these dialogues is often a cross,
> which sounds pretty logical. 
> 
> Yet, other dialogues have one button, marked "Close"[2] (dialogue 2).
> These appear to do the same thing as the saving button in the first type
> of dialogue. Here's the crazy thing: the save button in dialogue 2 is
> marked with a cross! What's going on here? It's too much for me to
> understand.

The "Close" button in dialogue 2 isn't really the same as the "Save"
button in dialogue 1.

The first dialogue is "explicit apply", which means that you need to do
something to apply the changes (pressing Save in this case). The second
dialogue is "instant apply", which means that your changes are saved
immediately, and the button just closes the window (like the one in the
window frame).


I can see how using the same icon could be confusing.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
"The number of Unix installations has grown to 10, with more expected."
    -- The Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972