Re: re Hiding controls and another question
Re: re Hiding controls and another question
- Subject: Re: re Hiding controls and another question
- From: Patrick Holleran <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 21:00:09 -0800
On Thursday, February 28, 2002, at 10:45 PM, Erik M. Buck wrote:
I am absolutely flabbergasted that so many people seem to want to hide
controls rather than disable them. Where does the fetish for misleading
users originate ? How and why is hiding a control ever preferable to
disabling the control. (Tab views, inspector panels, pop-up-buttons,
and
drawers are all techniques for decluttering my hiding some user
interface
elements, but their existence and behavior is expected by users.)
Disappearing buttons and text fields and color wells, and even progress
bars
is not expected. See all of the preceding arguments.
It doesn't take much imagination to see that the ability to hide and
show controls, or groups of controls, is quite often very useful and has
always been part of the Macintosh interface. An obvious example in OS X
would be the Toolbar, which allows the user to show or fully hide the
interface items it contains. Or check out Internet Connect, which allows
a number of controls to be disclosed or hidden. Nobody would want to
have to look at all of that stuff all the time.
Absolute statements like "controls should never be hidden" are not
representative of good human interface design, and I agree with the
poster who found it odd that Cocoa doesn't allow this to be done easily.
-Pat H.
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