Re: display dialog
Re: display dialog
- Subject: Re: display dialog
- From: "Steven D. Majewski" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 09:45:01 -0400
Re: large amounts of text in dialogs:
Somewhat of a kludge, but what works for us, where
we have a rather large list of commands for renaming files
that we want the user to see before clicking 'OK' is to
write it out to a text file and open it it TextEdit.app.
We put a summary at the top of the file -- number of
file for which change-case, "illegal" char removal, resequencing
( all of the filenames are getting normalized to a
prefix_seq#_user-field.ext
pattern. ), etc. Then the script tells TextEdit to display dialog
with only a brief do-you-really-want-to-do-this-now question.
You can't scroll to the bottom of the text with the dialog in front,
but you can move the dialog out of the way to read the summary.
If the summary results look odd, you can 'Cancel' and then examine
the whole file, and if everything is OK, then run the script again.
( You could probably maximize the window from AS if you needed to.)
It really works better with our workflow than it sounds: a large number
of unexpected changes usually means someone has to stop and examine
the log file in detail.
Good user interface design would call for both a smarter error detector
up front, and presenting the user with less text, which would call for a
smarter summary, but sometimes a "dumb" script is still 10 times better
than doing it manually, and you often don't have a good idea how to make
it smarter until you've looked at what can go wrong with unexpected
inputs.
-- Steve Majewski
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