Comments on: non-instant-apply preferences dialogs

By: Clare

Clare — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 04:46:18 +0000

Having more than three buttons with no “OK” or “Cancel” on the dialog is too confusing. No “OK” or “Cancel” buttons violates consistency in the interface. Presenting more than three buttons to the users increases the mental processing deciding which button to press (and thus increasing mistakes!).

Just my two cents, I vote for the dialog having “OK”, “Cancel” and “Apply” buttons. You don’t have to agree with me . Interface designing is an art – there is no absolute right or wrong. ;)

By: Leon Stringer

Leon Stringer — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 19:49:51 +0000

Yes, I think ‘Default’ is a very important option. If you have a complicated dialog you certainly want to back out of any changes you’ve made (Undo/Cancel) but what if you want to go back to the factory defaults. E.g. You’re a new user, you’ve made some changes and things aren’t working right. But you’re not sure which of a myriad of options has caused this. You just want to go back to the nice, warm, safe set of default options.

How about, the caption of ‘Undo’ is ‘Defaults’ when the dialog first appears. Making any changes causes the caption to change to Undo. Want to revert your change? Click ‘Undo’ (caption reverts to ‘Defaults’). If you’ve made no changes (or have undone your changes) and want to revert to Defaults, then click that.

By: giovanni

giovanni — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:38:04 +0000

Nice article :)

You can think of a ‘Default’ button as well.

By: me

me — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:05:53 +0000

Showing settings that are not applied yet when a preferences dialog is shown is a terrible, counterintuitive idea. It directly opposes the instant-apply theory as well as how people expect “delayed apply” to work.

By: Ghisa

Ghisa — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:48:33 +0000

My suggestion is:

Apply
Apply & Close
Close

Bye
Ghisa

By: erik

erik — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:39:55 +0000

[Smiling face][Sad face]

Wouldn’t require translations either :-D

By: Mi viene il vomito… (cit) « pollycoke :)

Mi viene il vomito… (cit) « pollycoke :) — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:36:39 +0000

[...] Ryan Lortie si è messo d’impegno e ha un po’ rimesso in discussione l’attuale disposizione dei pulsanti presenti nelle finestre di dialogo GNOME. È partito dal minimo assoluto: [...]

By: Anders Brander

Anders Brander — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 11:33:45 +0000

I’ve always thought preference windows in Gnome should have two buttons: [Revert] [Close]

Revert would revert to the settings when the window was opened, and Close would – well – close the window ;)

By: Mikael Jansson

Mikael Jansson — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 10:37:37 +0000

I like the BeOS one:

http://prognathous.mail-central.com/prognathous/mozilla/beos/fonts/menu.png

At startup, “Revert” (or “Undo”, if you like) is grayed out. When you change something, it becomes enabled and you can get back to whatever it was.

Then, there’s the default set of settings you can load back if you’ve changed something, closed the dialog box and then open it again and forgot what it /used/ to be.

By: Denis Washington

Denis Washington — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 10:11:51 +0000

I would just go with OK/Cancel for non-instant-apply dialogs. IF they are not instant apply, the preferences are also usually things that are only noticed later anyway (like changed in gdm settings, which only show up after restarting X). So the two actions:

1. Close without applying, come back and change something, apply and close
2. Apply and close, come back and change something, apply and close

should be, for all that matters, semantically equivalent. A separate Close button could even lead to _inconsistent_ behavior compared to instant-apply dialogs. What about, for instance, changing gdm settings, clicking Close, and restarting X afterwards? Your previous changes would have no effect at all.