From: Alan Horkan (horkana@maths.tcd.ie)
Date: Sun Jun 01 2003 - 12:41:37 EDT
On 1 Jun 2003, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Date: 01 Jun 2003 18:10:39 +0200
> From: Christian Neumair <chris@gnome-de.org>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@maths.tcd.ie>
> Cc: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: Re: [PATCH] Password dialog HIGification patch + Set Language
> dialog fix
>
> Am Son, 2003-06-01 um 16.20 schrieb Alan Horkan:
> > On 1 Jun 2003, Christian Neumair wrote:
> >
> > > Date: 01 Jun 2003 12:19:00 +0200
> > > From: Christian Neumair <chris@gnome-de.org>
> > > To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> > > Subject: [PATCH] Password dialog HIGification patch + Set Language dialog
> > > fix
> > >
> > > The attached patch HIGifies the unix Password dialog and contains a few
> > > lines of xap translation header changes referring to the Set Language
> > > dialog Dom obviously forgot to commit.
> >
> > While replacing OK with an Action is usually an improvement, In this case
> > I think "Authenticate" is Overkill and frankly more confusing than OK
> > (to ordinary people Authenticate is not a simple word, and if you dont
> > have English as your first language it would be very unpleasant to try
> > and understand).
> > I dont recally seeing any other gnome password dialogs doing this.
> If English is not your first language you should try to find a
> translation appropriate for your mother tongue ;).
> Of course you're right, the terminology is requiring advanced English
> knowledge. I'm not sure whether that's the right way.
> I hope to get some more feedback, I just want to avoid Cancel|Ok'ism and
> give the label a more verbose description.
> Do you have a better proposal apart from having just an Ok button?
I am not among the people who feel the need to eredicate the OK button.
There was a discussion on the usability list recently in which people were
taking it a bit too far.
Consistantly using the same mnemonic can be useful in places where you are
happy to accept the default values.
It is on dangerous destructive actions that OK should definately be
avoided.
Do you want to obliterate your hardrive? [ OK ]
OK is best used to acknowledge benign bits of information or tasks that
you dont really have much choice about.
I believe Msword now has message dialogs that dont steal focus and will go
away automatically after a few seconds if you ignore them, which nicely
covers the situations where the status bar isn't quite good enough.
The OK button is almost irrelavant in this dialog, you should be able to
type the password and hit return.
Dont try too hard, OK is fine in this situation.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
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