Writing a design specification is a balancing act. The less text, the more unanswered questions; but the more text, the less people will read it at all. I answered this particular question in the spec in May 2013: “Unlike the other System Settings screens, changes in the ‘Display language’ screen should not take effect immediately, for two reasons. First, the whole UI being in an unfamiliar language would make an accidental change highly disorienting. Second, the list of languages is long, so the previous language may not be visible while scrolling, making reverting an accidental change moderately difficult. Therefore, instead of being part of the page stack, ‘Display Language’ should be a dialog…” <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LanguageAndText#display-language>
I wrote that before I knew the device would need to restart to change language, but that is an unfortunate extra reason: prompting you to restart immediately when you change a radio selection, or when you tap a Back button, would be much more surprising than after you tap a “Confirm…” button. (I just reported bug 1596491 about the ellipsis.) What I also didn’t say there, partly because it was the first example, was that it’s not unique. There are a few other cases in System Settings where a dialog should be used for various reasons: because partial input that wasn’t explicitly discarded would be harmful (SIM PIN) or cause confusing errors (APN, manual VPN), and/or for consistency when the same UI is invoked outside of System Settings (wi-fi authentication, Online Accounts registration). Unfortunately, if you survey those examples you’ll see they all look different. This is apparently because the toolkit doesn’t implement dialogs that can be full-screen and/or scroll properly, and System Settings engineers found it easier to implement half a dozen simulations of a full-screen dialog than to contribute a dialog implementation to the toolkit. Last year I reported bug 1503220 on the visual style of this particular dialog, so to the extent that this bug is valid I think it’s a duplicate. One way of fixing it would be to improve the dialog simulation; another would be to do the toolkit work. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1589711 Title: "Display language" panel is oddly unique To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-ux/+bug/1589711/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
