Re: modal dialogs etc.

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Fri, 5 Oct 2001, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 05:36:38PM -0400, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > In current gnumeric if you invoke anything modal, the entire program
> > in the background gets "greyed out" until the modal task is completed.
>
> In my opinion this is a desirable behaviour for modal operations.
> Admittedly it would be nice to have fewew modal operations, but for
> those that do make sense I'd rather be honest with the user and
> tell them that the commands on the menu are disabled, rather than
> silectly ignoring them as MS does.

I don't have anything against a bit of modality, as such.  But
gnumeric is sort of out on a limb in dimming the whole app whenever
the user is doing something modal.  It's not just MS that "silently
ignores" forbidden mouse-clicks.  Cf. mozilla, abiword, etc, etc.
IMO it's a matter of "honesty" versus what the user is likely to
expect.  I know that newbies often have trouble with modality --
"Why's this menu not working??" -- but I'm not sure that visually
disabling everything is going to help much.

Allin Cottrell.