Re: [Gramps-devel] Re: gramps 0.4.0 released

[Jochen T. <jo...@re...>]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 08:27:42PM -0600, Don Allingham wrote:
> On 10 Aug 2001 11:35:17 +0200, Jochen Topf wrote:
> > - preferences dialog: the ok or apply buttons work only on the current shown
> >   tab. I think this is different from how other programs work and anyways
> >   visually the buttons don't belong to the tab content but to the whole
> >   dialog, so they should act that way.
> 
> From my understanding from the gnome documentation, you can choose to
> have "apply" work only for a current tab or for all the tabs. At this
> point, I have chosen the second option because it vastly simplifies
> things. Maybe as time allows....
> 
> Or am I not understanding the problem? (wouldn't be the first time :-)

Well, both options are equally valid, but what the function should follow the
layout the user sees. I try a little drawing:

+----------------------------------------+
| /TAB 1\  /TAB 2\  /TAB 3\              |
| +-----+------------------------------+ |
| | XXX                                | |
| | OK  APPLY  CANCEL                  | |
| +------------------------------------+ |
+----------------------------------------+

Here the OK, APPLY, CANCEL buttons are clearly part of the tab, so they should
only work on the contents of the tab.

+----------------------------------------+
| /TAB 1\  /TAB 2\  /TAB 3\              |
| +-----+------------------------------+ |
| | XXX                                | |
| +------------------------------------+ |
|                                        |
| OK  APPLY  CANCEL                      |
+----------------------------------------+

Here the OK, APPLY, CANCEL buttons are clearly a part of the whole dialog,
not of a single tab. So they should work on the whole thing.

The dialog in gramps looks to me like case 2 but behaves like case 1. I don't
know how this stuff is implemented in Gnome. I don't know whether there are
any "Approved (TM) Gnome User Interface Rules" that help the UI author with
things like this (there should be...). I have seen other programs that have
the exact same problem, this is difficult to get right. But ideally every
program should just work the way a moderatly experienced user thinks it works,
just from looking at it.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf - jo...@re... - http://www.remote.org/jochen/