Re: Modal dialog alternatives?
Re: Modal dialog alternatives?
- Subject: Re: Modal dialog alternatives?
- From: Andy Bettis <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 16:58:54 +0100
On 16 Jun 2005, at 14:01, Pandaa wrote:
15 jun 2005 kl. 15.51 skrev Andy Bettis:
There's more. Each transaction is assigned to a category. There is
a menu item that brings up a modal dialog showing a list of the
categories, and by double-clicking on an entry in the list
another modal dialog is displayed allowing the selected category
to be edited. Again, having the dialogs be movable means the user
can see the existing items, and anyway I believe that having
sheets upon sheets is frowned upon by Apple too.
Having non-modal windows makes the updating of data very messy.
If, for example, I had a spreadsheet-lloking table for my
transactions where users could change the data directly when do I
perform the validation?
Continuously, with a slight delay while the user types data?
Flagging the transaction and field as red or grayed out when the
data is in an invalid state, offering a short, concise non-modal
and non-distracting explanation somewhere?
But then you need to have a messages area which eats into the screen
real estate, which will be blank for most of the time and (almost
certainly) not big enough for a meaningful message when needed. Or
which contains error messages that will go away when the user
finishes editing all the fields, and so the user will learn to ignore?
That would allow more than one transaction to be in a temporary
invalid state at once, which in some cases may be a more natural
way for someone to perform an edit than being forced into editing
one-whole-transaction-at-a-time.
The trouble with 'temporarily invalid' transactions is that they put
the document itself into an 'invalid' mode, so that reports,
analyses, projections, etc. can not be produced.
I'm sorry if I seem to be just stubborn and bloody minded, it's not
that things have to be be done my way or not at all but that the
clients I've written systems for have been happiest with modal data
entry for stuff like accounts, bookings, etc. where entries always
have a clear state.
So, any suggestions? I really am open to other ways of doing this,
but not at the expense of the ease of use for the user.
Perhaps you could have the transaction-editor inside the same
window as the transaction-list, sliding up from the bottom of the
window instead of appearing inside its' own dialog? That would
allow the user to interact fully with the transaction-list while
editing an individual transaction, and could potentially make
switching between editing different fields much quicker. When the
field editor is done, it could slide down again leaving the
transaction window as it was. ( a bit like the album art viewer in
iTunes )
This is more or less the same as having a non-modal dialog, with the
problems I have explained already. With modals the document as a
whole is always self consistent, otherwise there's always some
assumption that has to be made about the user's intentions (which is
often not an area of strength for programmers!)
( The mac-gui-dev mailing list may be a good place to ask about
questions like this. )
I looked at the ADC mailing list page and couldn't find this - where
is it?
Many thanks for the input and suggestions.
Rev. Andy
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Cocoa-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden