Re: Balsa's dialogs

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

Hi André,

Thanks for the thoughts!

On Mar 26, 2015, at  7:10 AM, andré wrote:
> My initial reaction was preferring 3 options, "Save", "Save and quit",  
> and "Quit".  But coming back after some reflection, I think "Save" and  
> "Cancel" would be good.  ("Close" seems ambiguous.)
> This assumes that you would always exit after either choice, since I  
> don't understand why you would want to not exit after save.

Saving without closing is useful if you want to store multiple addresses  
from one message. I know I've used that feature, but only rarely! I  
couldn't argue strongly for keeping it.

> If there is a good reason to NOT exit after "Save", but you want to  
> always exit otherwise, then "Save" and "Quit" would be better.

As far as I know, "Quit" is always reserved for quitting an entire  
application, and is not used just to close a single window.

> In that case, having an extra click but a simpler interface seems a  
> reasonable tradeoff.
>
> BTW, I would somewhat prefer "Save" to the left, and "Cancel" or "Quit"  
> to the right.  (Like the theatre, where it is generally "exit right".)
> But of course it is useful to be coherent with the other dialogs.

We'd have to dig fairly deeply into the dialog to change the placement.  
Balsa just adds the buttons to the dialog, and if the response code is  
GTK_RESPONSE_CANCEL or GTK_RESPONSE_HELP the GtkDialog places button on  
the left, and places all others on the right. The HIG advises this layout:  
<URL:https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/dialogs.html.en#order>.

Since the menu item is singular ("Store address...") and the dialog title  
is the same, a user could reasonably expect to be able to save a single  
address, and be only a little inconvenienced (but not surprised) when  
unable to store more than one. And since "store" is an action, "cancel"  
seems like the correct way to, well, cancel it :)

So I guess I'm coming around to this:

Cancel (on the left): close the dialog without storing any address;
Save (on the right): store the currently selected address, and close the  
dialog.

But is the distinction between "store" and "save" confusing in any  
language? Perhaps it should be the generic OK/Cancel pairing?

Peter

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