Re: Native file chooser dialog on Windows

["Brian J. Tarricone" <bjt23 cornell edu>]

Cody Russell wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 13:51 -0400, David Cantin wrote:
> > I don't known about this, but from an usability point of view, using
> > native dialog should help applications users because they can use
> > skills they have learned while they were using others applications..
> >
> > Those details are always sensibles when using a foreign gui toolkit.
> >
> > I will look into what Tim Evans have said.
>
> If you implement a dialog using gtk+ widgets that is laid out like the
> native dialog, has the same accelerators, etc.. then users can take
> advantage of these skills as you describe and we can use features of gtk
> and it will look absolutely natural in the application.

The problem with this is in the details, and getting them right for 
various versions of Windows.  If we continue to use the standard gtk 
file chooser widget, it looks quite a bit different, but at least it's 
*supposed* to be different.

If you create a look-alike dialog, and it's not *perfect*, people will 
get thrown off.  Maybe the autocomplete behavior of the entry box 
doesn't work *exactly* the same.  Maybe one of the accelerators is 
wrong.  Maybe the icon positioning is slightly different.  Maybe the 
dropdown list at the top works differently.  There are plenty of other 
examples, and they all serve to be small jarring differences that 
possibly end up confusing the user more than having a totally different 
file chooser.

Having said that... creating even a close-but-not-perfect copy of the 
Windows file chooser still sounds like a pretty attractive option.

(Does the chooser look the same on all versions of Windows if you ignore 
theming?  Win2k?  WinXP?  Vista?  Windows 7?)

This is also an issue on MacOS X...  Mac users are even more crazy about 
all applications fitting into the (not really standard) standard 
platform look and feel than Windows users are.

	-brian