On 27.08.2010, at 02:00, k...@highrolls.net wrote: > Our market (machine embroidery) realizes 29 file types. A customer may have a > machine that recognizes 3 or 4 of these. Giving them the ability to filter > file types from an open panel is quite reasonable and has nothing to do with > their preference of Mac over Windows.
A few usability suggestions (unrelated to the actual solving of the problem, which has happened elsewhere): 1) The typical choice for selecting among choices would be an NSPopUpButton. Menus on the Mac support type-ahead, so unless you *need* the user to be able to specify an arbitrary extension, a combo box is actually more work (as you'd have to reject useless extensions your app can't deal with). NSPopUpButton already does that. 2) Your design puts the onus on the user to decide what types their machine suggests. A design that is more kind to less technical users would be if your app queried what devices are attached, looked up in a table what types this device supports, and made the filter default to only accepting the types the machine supports. If users are likely to detach devices, you could at least remember the devices your app has seen and put them at the top of the menus. But really, just getting rid of the menu will remove a source of confusion. 3) Why reject any types of files? If the user has embroidery files, they probably want to embroider them on an attached machine. It'd be much nicer to your users, instead of forcing them to filter the files they can't have for a (for them) arbitrary reason, if you converted files to whatever type their machine supports best. -- Uli Kusterer "The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..." http://www.masters-of-the-void.com _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
