> > What about adding some GIMP-like toolbar buttons representing the > > selection mode? These would be mutually exclusive: "add to selection", > > "replace selection", "subtract from selection". > > > Heh, that's a very clever idea IMHO :) I hope it gets taken seriously. > Maybe you could eventually make a mockup using Glade or something, > people could get a slightly better idea about what you're saying.
That would introduce a state into the application and the user will now have a new problem, how to get out of that state. This kind of behaviour (function oriented user interfaces) is considered bad among those people who prefer object oriented metaphors (object oriented user interfaces). Other people tend to believe that such behaviour is quite natural as you would pick up tools before you use them. Somehow this is central to being a human, we pick up tools.. ;) It should be possible to make user interfaces with a duality, you can use objects and methods related to those objects (select a file and then destroy it) but you can also pick up tools and do actions on a object (pick up a destructor and dump it on a file). In many applications one or the other would be preferred by most people. That does not imply that you should dismiss the other, or that you can program a user interface without the other one at all. In an application I once programmed we tried very hard to get around this and make everything into objects. Especially selection strategies were extremely hard to code as methods. Some of the reasons we believe were that a selection method is a global method for the objects, and global methods don't belong at the instance level in that application. It could very well be that this could be right in some other application. When we reformulated those pesty global methods as tools (like the palette in gimp) things turns out quite easy. The selection object would then have a limited set of attributes which changed it to stick to specific objects and with a swat size to control which objects became selected. John _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
