'Follow the leader' dialogs

[Zack Rusin]

On Sunday 04 August 2002 15:13, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Sunday 04 August 2002 21:01, Zack Rusin wrote:
> > On Sunday 04 August 2002 12:57, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > >" The question is - do we want this? Do we want our
> > >  dialogs to follow the parent? "
>
>  No no no, I didn't ask that. I asked why and _when_ should this
> feature be useful.
>
> > This was the only question asked. Patch wasn't for testing/commit
> > or anything else involving review - it was there to give people who
> > had no clue what I was talking about an idea of how it would work
> > (not the code, but behavior). I take you answer was 'I don't like
> > that behavior and am against it' right?
>
>  Kind of. I simply don't see 'why' and especially 'when'.

Fair enough.
o why  - to keep some form association between dialogs and parents if 
the title is highly non-descriptive (e.g. -title = 'Save Changes' , 
-text = 'Do you want to save this document', -buttons = 'OK','Cancel')
o when - whenever you have a couple of things opened and some of them 
have the 'automatic save every x minutes' feature turned on, suddenly a 
dialog pops out with a text like in the above example and the user is 
left trying to figure out which window does this dialog belong to,
o why2 - in case where you are not ready to respond to some dialogs of 
one of the applications you have had opened and just want to move them 
(for example to a different viewport),
o when2 - when you're working with multiple applications at the same 
time.

Please note that I'm not a usability expert and points that I just made 
contain a 'IMHO' notice. To be completely honest (again IMHO) _the_ 
best implementation of a feature along these lines is in the FluxBox 
WM:
http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/features/tabs.php
making the association not only on a parent-child relationship but on a 
user-pick basis (it may be just me again, but it looks like it makes 
managing Gimp windows a little easier).

Zack


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