Re: [Usability] instant-apply issue

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

Havoc,

On 12 Jan 2002, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> [cc to desktop-devel added since several people have asked this]

> > gconf-editor. Should the widget in the prefs dialog reflect that?

> My opinion is fairly strongly that this is a bad idea - I have to
> disagree with Jeff and Nils here.

>  4) I don't like it from a UI standpoint, because the chances are much
>     higher that the gconf key was suddenly set by some system
>     implementation detail or something, than that the user has
>     switched to a terminal and started using "gconftool" - so if you
>     update prefs widgets on gconf key changes, you are blowing away
>     what the user had typed in. i.e. there's potential for losing user
>     data. Granted with instant-apply this is less of an issue, but
>     e.g. if you apply on focus out of a text entry, you could
>     overwrite the text before the focus out, for example.
>
>  5) I don't like it from a UI standpoint, because the user won't
>     understand why the value suddenly changed in the dialog
>     all by itself.

As far as I understand, an instant-apply window necessarily reflects the
current system state. When there is an inconsistency between the contents
of the window with the system state, bizarre things could happen when the
user clicks the widget to activate some function when it has already been
activated by some other process. I doubt if programming around this risk
is less work than actively updating your interface to reflect the things
that are going on.

-- 

Reinout van Schouwen
e-mail    : reinout cs vu nl
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