Instant apply and explicit apply in KDE HIG

[Thomas Zander]

On Friday 03 March 2006 23:19, Ellen Reitmayr wrote:
> I'm tempted to think it's a good idea to promote instant apply in
> certain, defined situations
I agree; the situation should be so that apply is typically
counter-intuitive. Your kivio example is a good one where instant
apply is more logical than having some sort of apply.
As long as we agree that if there actually is an apply button the
instant-apply will not be used.

>  assuming that the history works.

How I always implemented 'instant apply' and history is to have a
final commit only on focus lost of the widget.  As long as the focus
is held, the current undo action is changed, meaning you press undo
ones to undo all interaction with that spinbox.
Note that using the numeric input and then clicking on the arrows with
the mouse will not make the widget ever loose focus.

This means;
go to a spinbox and alter it using any means you want.  Assume value
10 in there before you started and you used the (keyboard) arrows to
change it to 20.  This means you had values 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 20 in there.
Pressing undo at that time will reset the value to 10.
If, however, you altered the value to 16 and then pressed tab or
clicked somewhere, got back to this widget and continue to alter it to
20, it would take 2 undo actions to get it back to 10.

If this is confusing I can look up an (java) example of an application
that does it like that. Let me know.
--
Thomas Zander