Re: re Hiding controls and another question
Re: re Hiding controls and another question
- Subject: Re: re Hiding controls and another question
- From: Donald Brown <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 07:43:47 -0600
on 3/5/02 11:00 PM, Patrick Holleran at email@hidden wrote:
>
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.
The problem is that we are dealing with two competing sets of interfaces,
both with standards that have developed over years. And thus we have Mac
programmers (like myself) where hiding irrelevant controls is considered the
proper thing to do, because when you show a disabled control the user's
first question is "Why can't I click in this checkbox?" And you have *Step
programmers where dimming irrelevant controls is considered the proper thing
to do, because when controls are hiding and appearing the user goes "Whoa!
Where'd that button go!"
Thus was it always done on the Mac isn't a good enough argument, thus was it
always done on *Step isn't a good enough argument. It's going to take some
time for the two histories to merge, and what will come out will be a
mixture of the two.
Donald
--
Donald Brown
email@hidden
http://www.eamontales.com
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo
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