[openbeos] Re: BeOS/Haiku UI question

Hi,

> This is really something the UI guidlines should cover, I don't think Be 
> ever actually produced any (their newsletter archive has a lot of talk 
> about them being in progress).

Hm. Personally, I'd rather spend the time and energy on having a full fledged 
layout management than writing UI guidelines. It is somehow dull to have UI 
guidelines but make it so hard to even have font-sensitive UIs.

> For me BeOS is primarily about responsiveness. That basically means 
> settings should be instantly applied as they are changed. Not many BeOS 
> pref panels have a "Default" button and I'm not sure they're particularly 
> useful - if the settings are applied instantly the user can test and 
> "Revert" to the previous ones (which would be the default on the first 
> opening of the settings panel anyway). Complicated settings panels that 
> require more testing from the user about whether or not it's a good choice 
> could have a button to set defaults I suppose - but if the user can make 
> things so bad by changing the settings that a defaults button is required 
> then maybe the question of "why are we actually presenting this as an 
> option to the user?" should be asked.

A "Defaults" button is more for taking the user by the hand. It's like 
saying, "no matter what you change here - you cannot mess up, you can always 
return to the defaults". So a Defaults button is in a way an invitation to 
even mess with the settings in the first place... :-)

> Settings that obviously can't be applied in real time (screen prefs and 
> others) should have an "Apply" button.
> 
> I think the normal close button should just do that - close the window. The 
> next time I opened the window I would expect it to be in exactly the same 
> state as when I closed it.

I'm kind of with you on this, even though I think Koki wanted to save the 
user the trouble of clicking twice to close the window. While that sounds 
like a good idea in general, sometimes there is value to "keeping things 
simple". By that I mean that the user has to think less, "Apply" and the 
Close button each performing just one thing.

> The way I think about it, settings are always there determining how my 
> computer works, whether or not I have a window open to show them to me. 
> Thus I find the whole windows "Cancel" concept quite confusing - I don't 
> actually want to "Cancel" my printer settings as I still want windows to 
> know about the printer I had configured. What I actually want to do is 
> "Revert" the settings to how they were before I started changing them and 
> then close the window.
> 
> Hence I'd go with a (Apply)/Revert/Close button selection. I really think 
> from a conceptual point of view this is this best possible view of what the 
> user can do with settings.

I agree.

Best regards,
-Stephan

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