On 7/4/07, Ted Gould <ted@...11...> wrote:
On Tue, 2007-07-03 at 13:34 -0400, bulia byak wrote:
It's not about logic. It's about "feel" if you like, about perception and doing what is expected. If I have a dialog with several parameters, and you set them in turn, you are not interested in seeing the result after only one parameter is set. But once you set the first parameter, you see something changing on your canvas and you waste your time trying to figure out what happened. This is annoying and wasteful (although, of course, in another situation where I want to fine-tune the parameters, it's a huge time saver).
So, if there was a status bar explaining what's going on?
That is certainly useful and even necessary. But it does not solve the problem. It is a severe psychological setback to see something happening to your beloved document without your sanction that you cannot stop or prevent. This stirs up fears - What's going on? Will I need to undo this if I don't like it? Will I even be able to undo something I honestly didn't do? Remember that not all effects are easy to figure out - with some parameters, your selection may simply disappear or turn into something absolutely unrecognizable, or at least something difficult to match with the stated purpose of the effect. Even if your statusbar answers all these questions, it wastes my time to worry and think about all this.
When I first open an effect dialog, I focus my attention on it and I just don't want to be distracted until I have figured out the meaning of the controls and want to see them in action. That's when I check on the "Live preview" box (this concept is familiar to most users, I'm sure, if only because it's used in Photoshop) and start playing with it. Next time when I use this effect, I already know its controls, so it's OK that the Live preview will be on from the start. But it definitely must be off _by default_, and I hope I explained why.