Gnome's Dialogues

[Matthew East]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 15:34 +0200, Eric Feliksik wrote:
> Matthew East wrote:
> > 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.
> You are right. Is the green checkmark-icon still used these days? Maybe 
> it would better illustrate the functionality of the close button in 
> dialogue 2 (http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/images/pessulus.png)

The problem with that is that a "tick" is misleading about what the
dialogue does. As James pointed out, changes are done instantly, so the
close button doesn't actually have any effect except to close the
dialogue.

> > (...)
> > I really feel that the usability of the dialogues would be improved by
> > having one type of dialogue rather than two. I can see the distinction
> > you're making, but I can't see any obvious reason for it, and I
> > certainly think most users will be confused. I've often clicked the
> > cross in the top right corner of the dialogue instead of "Close", in the
> > hope that my changes won't be retained.
> > 
> 
> Actually I really like the 'instant apply' functionality, I think 
> 'apply' buttons everywhere would be unhandy.

Apply buttons are annoying when they don't close the dialogue. A button
which has the effect of "Save and exit" (like dialogue 1 in my example)
is a much clearer. I would strongly argue that the best solution is for
all dialogues to be like dialogue 1, i.e. "Cancel", "Save".

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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