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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