On Thu, 2003-09-11 at 16:20, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
This is a cool feature, but we should keep it optional. Our primary audience are Windows users, and they are not used to that. Heck, even I am not used to it, I am used to be able to play around with stuff in dialogs, and than press CANCEL. In fact, KDE is not instant apply, so I would argue that even most Linux users are used to that.
That is a valid point, but I would counter that if we have settings complex enough that a reasonably normal person cannot remember what they changed, they shouldn't be settings at all. Now, that's fine for check boxes, combo boxes etc, for the drive configuration there are quite a lot of text edits, so some kind of revert/cancel function may well be a good plan.
On the other hand, I've met quite a few people who don't grok the difference between "OK" and "Apply". They press Apply, nothing changes, and they think "what just happened?", especially in this case because you have to restart the apps running under emulation to see the effects.
The other confusing thing is that if you click OK, then reopen the dialog, Cancel no longer does anything. That's confusing because most people don't make a link between the dialog disappearing, and the changeset being committed then freed.
I'd argue that we need to support instant apply to integrate with GNOME, but to default to the classic OK/CANCEL for now, until we can figure how and when to enable one or the other behaviour.
Maybe, but having two different behaviours could itself be pretty confusing.
I'll implement revert in dialogs where there is clearly a need (the drive edit is probably one of those areas), but in others the only value I can see for having a cancel button is to follow what Windows (which basically doesn't having much of a HIG at all) and KDE (which typically follows windows) do. Having revert/close then is basically like OK/cancel except the buttons are labelled differently - the functionality is the same.
I'd recommend you try it anyway, and see how it feels. Certainly I found instant apply felt much snappier, simpler and more understandable - so far I haven't missed cancel buttons (but otoh i was never one to change a setting, hit apply to see what it did etc, i just changed them).
thanks -mike