Re: [Usability]Re: An alternative proposal for instant-apply vs. non-instant-apply

[Michael Rogers <banthafodder connectfree co uk>]

Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> I've been thinking about this tonight and I came up with "audiovisual
> feedback". Already GTK widgets can "light up" when the mouse pointer is
> over them. My idea is to distinguish instant-apply from delayed-apply by
> highlighting the entire widget that was activated, and let the selection
> gradually fade away.

Another idea based on the same principle but kind of reversed:

In all dialogs, changes that have not yet been applied should be
highlighted. (The widget should remain in the 'changed'/'dirty' state
until the changes are applied.) This would make the distinction between
instant-apply and explicit-apply dialogs obvious, and would provide
visual feedback for Apply and Reset/Revert. It would also make it
possible to use instant-apply dialogs for changes that might take a
couple of seconds to apply: the changes would be highlighted until they
had been applied. In a notebook widget, the tabs of 'dirty' pages should
be highlighted so that the user can easily see which pages will be
affected when the Apply or OK button is pressed.

Michael