On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Liam R. E. Quin wrote: > Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 13:55:40 -0500 > From: Liam R. E. Quin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Calum Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Usability] HIG Clarification for "Close Without Saving" > button > > On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 10:56 +0000, Calum Benson wrote: > > On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 11:41, Patrick Costello wrote: > > > Therefore, the label in the original message would be: > > > "Close Without Saving". > > I'd be happy to update the HIG to reflect that, too. Although as it > > happens I prefer "Don't Save" anyway (contraction and all)-- if it's > > good enough for the Mac... :) > > The right question, I think, is, "what choices does the user need?" > > Consider quitting an application and getting the message, > "You have several documents open and one or more has > unsaved changes" > Stupid computer! *WHICH* documents have unsaved changes? Tell me!
Yup it is annoying. Although I am the kind of user who opens more than fifty application windows at a time. I suspect that ordinary users particularly ordinary Gnome users do not have the same problems of having many documents with unsaved changes open as I believe they are more likely to only have two or three documents open. (And to be honest I tend dot open many windows when I'm viewing rather than editing things, when I'm editing I dont believe I keep very many unsaved documents open at a time if I can avoid it). The one important point I want to make is that even if we want to look at the case of many unsaved documents being open it would still be useful to have a standard dialog for when only one unsaved document is open. (When - like most in most Gnome applications - you are using SDI and treat each window as a seperate document and only have the option to Close and no button for Quit you have no choice but to deal with the one document in question). > So now I want to go through each document in turn to see if I need > to save the changes. > > The dialogue, then, might usefully be -- > > There are five documents open with unsaved changes. > [ ] throw away all my work and quit anyway > [ ] I pressed quit by mistake, sorry, I know I'm stupid > [ ] close the documents you can, and I'll work on the others > [ ] show me a list of open documents so I can see what to do Try quitting the GIMP 2.2 with several modified but unsaved documents open, they have an interesting attempt at solving this seperate problem. > Another approach is "direct editing" in which changes are applied > instantly to the on-disk document. Gnome already has this in some > areas -- some preferences/settings boxes use the "instant apply" > paradigm, although this greatly increases the importance of the > undo mechanism. There is a long dicussion on the desktop-devel list roughly about this approach. While I admire the concept it would still be worth while in the short term to provide a standard Save Confirmation Dialog. It is a relatively simple task which I hope could be done in time for the next version of GTK and treated seperately from more ambitious long term goals like a "Auto Save" or "Zero save" system. To change the subject slightly: Who do I need to talk to about adding a GTK_STOCK_DISCARD? Irrespective of what label we use, be it "Close without saving", "Don't Save" or "Discard" I dont think anyone can disagree that we want to be able to have the same label used consistantly. - Alan H. _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
