Subject: Re: New List Dialog Ideas (LONG!)
From: Thomas Fletcher (thomasf@qnx.com)
Date: Tue Aug 08 2000 - 11:19:21 CDT
On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
> On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Thomas Fletcher wrote:
> <tons snipped>
>
> OK you've convinced me on a number of points. Unless people make arguments
> to stop me I will start implementing...
>
> 1. Pressing the list button if the cursor is on the line after a list will
> give you the next item in the list.
>
> 2. Two returns in a row will stop the list and give you a blank line.
>
> 3. Pressing backspace after a "list label"-TAB combination deletes both
> the TAB and list label and stops the list.
>
> 4. A start sub-list button.
I don't know that we need this button, but we can add it now
(for the explicit purposes of creating sublists for testing)
and then always remove it later if it becomes redundant. This
way we can have our cake and eat it too! (BTW I am a fan of the
Latex list style over the MS defaults ones ... you can get the
same behaviour in MS, just not by default).
> 5. No "stop list" in the dialog and I'll work on implementing a dialog
> along your suggestions.
> The dialog I came up with is both ugly and not user friendly. Your
> suggestions are certainly better than what I had.
>
> I'm convinced on these points at least. In any case reverse engineering
> the Word UI is often the best thing to do. It's what >100 million people
> have come to expect in Word Processor. There is nothing to be gained by
> confusing them without a good reason.
>
> I'm not sure about the "outline" list method though.
What I would like to see is that every list we have is an
"outline" list. In the case of a bulleted list it just
means that our bullets look different (or the same?) for
each level ... the same with the sublists. What do you
think about that? That would make the dialog simpler,
but I haven't actually looked at any of the list code to
know if you actually discern between a bullet list and
a number/calculated list.
> However before I do any of this I've got to fix some basic infrastructure
> in the list code. Paul found 6 crash bugs with what appeared to be very
> little effort.
Cool. I'll hold off on my core-dump investigations until
you get those patched up/investigated then.
> Feel free to implement the new List dialog on QNX first. Be sure to
> make it as xp as possible :-)
I live to make things XP =;-) I will certainly take a crack
at designing the interface, then we can work out the internal
calls (which should be strictly XP) used for information
gathering and setting options. I'm pretty sure that I should
be able to work with the initial list dialog callouts first.
Thomas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas (toe-mah) Fletcher QNX Software Systems
thomasf@qnx.com Neutrino Development Group
(613)-591-0931 http://www.qnx.com/~thomasf
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