Subject: Re: list dialog (was Re: Outstanding patches)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sun Aug 26 2001 - 23:17:59 CDT
At 12:17 PM 8/27/01 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
>Well Joaquin's the best person to answer about he is doing.
Yep. That's what I'm trying to get him to do. :-)
>I've since
>changed my mind about the Lists dialog. I think our Modeless Lists dialog
>is a cool way to manipulate lists. I just want to make a few more tweaks.
>Specifially, replace the "%L" in the List delimeter entry with actual List
>label and leave the entry on either side for text before and after the
>label. But that is all.
I think what you're saying here is that you really like the modeless
interaction for customizing and tweaking existing lists, right? Is your
objection just a modal vs. modeless thing, or is it something else?
>My impression was that Joaquin was working on a Modal Lists dialog to
>replace the current bullets and numbering dialog.
IIRC, the simpler front-end dialog is just a set of previews, which allows
new users to select an existing "look" with one or two clicks. Getting to
the advanced dialog shouldn't be any harder -- ie, at most one more click,
and perhaps fewer.
>If we go this route it
>becomes extremely hard to implement the Modeless Lists dialog everyone
>else has been working so hard to get right.
Really? Why?
I assume that once the first dialog is gone, there's no technical reason why
the second dialog has to be modal or modeless, right?
BTW, I haven't heard anyone arguing that Word's turbo-whizzy modal "power
user" dialog is better than your modeless one. Is that your worry? (I know
I haven't used either "power user" dialog enough to have an opinion about
their relative usability.)
>So it is not just a matter of clicking through to an "advanced" tab. All
>the cool interaction between the user, the auto-updating dialog and
>the document is lost. The whole experience is dimished.
Again, I'm not sure what you're objecting to here. Yes, your dialog might
be a click or two further away, but when you're first creating a list, being
able to quickly choose from a gallery of previews is a *feature*, no?
Moreover, once your "power user" dialog is up, then it should work exactly
the same way it does now.
I must be missing something here. What am I not understanding?
>Other parts of our UI for lists could be improved though. Tim DaLuca
>uncovered them and reported them in bugzilla. I'll get around to those
>eventually.
Cool. I'm glad you two are ironing all the kinks out there.
Paul
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