Subject: Re: FAQ -- why the MSDI interface? (aka, no pagers please)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sat Aug 18 2001 - 18:00:36 CDT
At 07:07 PM 8/18/01 +0000, David Chart wrote:
>On 18 Aug 2001 18:23:37 +0200, Håkan Waara wrote:
>> I would instead recommend that we hide the `Close' menuitem if there is
>> only one document left on the screen. That way the user won't use
>> `Close' accidently and we won't have to show that alert.
>
>That's confusing. Why can't the user close that document?
Exactly. As I mentioned in the original post, when I want to close the
window, let me close the window. Period. Removing that functionality (or
hiding it, or making it more difficult) is just annoying.
>Mind you, I don't think there is a good solution to this problem. The
>MSDI Just Breaks under this particular set of conditions.
I agree that this is a tricky issue, and I'd love to have usability lab data
to assess the impact of various alternatives. As mentioned in the original
post, the core issue here is determining what the most common use cases are.
(Does anyone have usability lab data on how many word processing documents
people typically edit simultaneously?)
>The current
>solution is bad, because it can lead to AbiWord unexpectedly vanishing.
>Greying the 'Close' menu item, along with a tooltip saying *why* it's
>greyed, may be the least bad solution, though.
Unfortunately, graying the menu item won't do enough for you. There are a
number of "reasonable" ways to close a window. For example, on Windows I
can think of at least four:
- the File / Close item on the main menu bar
- the associated keybinding (Ctrl-W)
- a platform-specific widget on the window's title bar
- the Close context menu item on the Windows taskbar
- etc.
I think it's far less confusing to have all such affordances trigger the
exact same behavior, and disabling them all is clearly a Bad Thing.
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Aug 18 2001 - 17:52:47 CDT