Alan Horkan wrote:
On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:32:24 -0800 From: Jon A. Cruz <jon@...18...> To: tj <999alfred@...210...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] stupid question
Not a stupid question. Not Mac specific either.
All dialogs are not created equal. Some dialogs need to be treated differently but historically Sodipodi/Inkscape treated all dialogs as if they were intended to be left open all the time and needed a very compact layout.
Palette/Panel dialogs need to be small and compact as they are intended to be left open all or most of the time. Having buttons for close at the bottom of the dialog is a big waste of space in these dialogs, and from other programs users do not really expect these to have buttons at the bottom, just use the window decoration (usually an X on the top right) or the corresponding menu item to close/hide them.
Big spacious transitory dialogs which are not intended to be left open all the time are quite different. They should always have buttons at the bottom of the dailog if developers want to follow the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (and Inkscape has that as a goal).
On Nov 20, 2006, at 1:42 PM, tj wrote:
I am a new user to inkscape and I have a stupid question.
How do you close windows like the document and inkscape preferences windows? I see no close, cancel, etc buttons?
There is a global option to turn on dialog buttons but it is set to off by default. This rather defeats the intention of the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines since the point of having a close button on dialog is to avoid confusing beginners, beginners who cannot be expected to know to turn on the close buttons and by they time they do they will most likely have figured how to close using the window decoration instead.
You'll probably want to mention your OS, and perhaps desktop and theme.
I get window decorations for those. Then again, I'm running on X11 on OS X.
You can also try F12 or the "View|Show/Hide Dialogs" menu item.
For certain dialogs like Preferences the Close button nees to be shown always. The short term solution it to change the default to show dialog buttons so that beginners who might otherwise be confused will have the buttons they expect. Unfortunately that messes up the panels so in the long run the two types of dialogs just need to be treated differently, a single global option will not work.
[ 1504038 ] Close (and Help) button(s) in preferences dialog (HIG) https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1504038&gr...
I thought I filed a request for the default to be changed but it looks like I filed the request before i even realised there was an option to turn the buttons back on.
Alan,
We have argued a lot, but this is one of the best descriptions of the different types of dialogs that I have ever seen. You should maybe generify it and send to some online publisher. An excellent discourse, sir!
bob