Instant apply and explicit apply in KDE HIG

[Ellen Reitmayr]

On Monday, 6. March 2006 23:47, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:

> Configuration dialogs might in fact be not so difficult from the
> implementation side. With the wider adoption of KConfig XT and concepts
> like KConfigDialog we might even have a central place to change the
> behavior of many dialogs.

Before changing KConfig dialog globally some things need to be checked:
- At which occasions in existing apps does instant apply not work (too long 
time to apply changes, concurrent confirmation required...). If we remove 
ok/cancel globally, we must make sure that there are no critical problems 
coming up.
- How many apps use variations of KConfig?
- Finally: What types of users do we want to address? The explicit act of 
confirming is an action that provides the feeling of control to many users. 
That may be an educational thing ("it's like that in windows"), but must not 
be underestimated - especially in the scope of configuration dialogs where 
you might break something.

> This sounds like a good approach. If the dialogs (or dockers or whatever)
> that use instant apply are clearly distinguishable from conventional config
> dialogs, it will certainly help to avoid inconsistency feeling for the
> user.
>
> Do you have any concrete ideas how this could look like? If I for example
> look at the config dialog of KOrganizer I think that almost all options
> would work better or at least as well as before with instant apply. How
> could I change this without confusing the user?

So far, dockers have only been used as toolboxes, or better: secondary 
toolbars. It's not possible to transfer that concept directly to 
configuration dialogs -> dockers are something that keeps on the screen while 
you are working on a task, and currently invoked using the view menu. dockers 
can be docked into the main window (split-pane). for config dialogs, that 
makes no sense. dockers won't work here, imo.

> As instant apply can be so much better than our current approach I think
> it's worth thinking about how we could do the big step of getting it wide
> adoption in KDE.

the biggest challenge is to distinguish the situations where instant apply 
works from those where it does not work (e.g. making internet connection 
settings). need to have another look at other systems how they do it.

cheers,
/el

-- 

Ellen Reitmayr
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org
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