Re: Newbie interface questions - multiple "modal" windows
Re: Newbie interface questions - multiple "modal" windows
- Subject: Re: Newbie interface questions - multiple "modal" windows
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:39:53 -0700
On 16 Jun '08, at 4:38 PM, Matthew Youney wrote:
I am creating an application that requires multiple “modal”
windows. There
is a “main” window, and there are multiple other windows that can be
displayed from the main window (using a toolbar, buttons, etc.).
These
“other” windows need to be modal, that is these windows must receive
all
user input, and be closed before returning to the “main” window.
Do you have any influence over the UI of this app, or was it dictated
by someone else? I ask because this sounds like a bad UI design to me
— modal windows should be avoided whenever possible, because they
constrain what the user can do (and can confuse novice users,
especially.)
For example, in this design you can never have more than one of those
windows open at once. That would be pretty annoying if someone needed
to do something that required going back and forth between them. I
don't know what they do, but I can imagine being halfway through
finishing with one window, and needing to look up a value from another
window, but not being able to do so without canceling the current
window and losing progress...
Is there a fundamental reason why those windows couldn't be enabled at
once? Or why you couldn't put all of this UI into a single window,
using something like an tab-view to switch between them?
I would think that this is a common application architecture (it is
to me)
You may be coming from another platform? I can't think of any Mac apps
that do this, and frankly, I wouldn't want to use one that did.
—Jens
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