Instant apply and explicit apply in KDE HIG

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 03 March 2006 03:19, Ellen Reitmayr wrote:
>  I'm tempted to think it's a good idea to promote instant apply in certain,
>  defined situations - assuming that the history works.

it's pretty obvious (at least to me?) that instant apply simply does not work 
in many circumstances[1]. having instant apply sometimes and not other times 
means that users now have to divine when it's one way or the other.

some of our dialogs would have "Cancel" and some would have "Close". some 
would offer an easy way to cancel the changes made thus far, others wouldn't. 
some would affect an out-of-dialog (and out-of-attention) resource while 
others wouldn't.

personally, i'm very concerned about the mish-mash such a "sometimes" stand 
would take. moreover, we'd have to get app developers implementing instant 
apply correctly at the right times, which is just one more thing we'd have to 
ask them to special case properly (the fewer such instances we have of that, 
the better).

from the development perspective, we have to have multiple modes in our 
generic dialog modes (== more code, more complexity and almost certainly more 
bugs) or else invest in a lot of code duplication (ug)

does the win outway the cost here? my suggestion would be 'no'


[1] change your widget style or icon theme for fun, then imagine that it 
changed every time you changed selection. or see the workflow of filter 
dialogs in graphics apps.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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