On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 10:56 +0000, Calum Benson wrote: > On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 11:41, Patrick Costello wrote: > > Therefore, the label in the original message would be: > > "Close Without Saving". > I'd be happy to update the HIG to reflect that, too. Although as it > happens I prefer "Don't Save" anyway (contraction and all)-- if it's > good enough for the Mac... :)
The right question, I think, is, "what choices does the user need?" Consider quitting an application and getting the message, "You have several documents open and one or more has unsaved changes" Stupid computer! *WHICH* documents have unsaved changes? Tell me! So now I want to go through each document in turn to see if I need to save the changes. The dialogue, then, might usefully be -- There are five documents open with unsaved changes. [ ] throw away all my work and quit anyway [ ] I pressed quit by mistake, sorry, I know I'm stupid [ ] close the documents you can, and I'll work on the others [ ] show me a list of open documents so I can see what to do Well, OK, maybe the messages could be less hateful. Another approach is "direct editing" in which changes are applied instantly to the on-disk document. Gnome already has this in some areas -- some preferences/settings boxes use the "instant apply" paradigm, although this greatly increases the importance of the undo mechanism. Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin Pictures from old books: http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/pictures/oldbooks/ IRC (chat) programs: www.ircreviews.org/clients/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
