User Interface Poll

[Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>]

I'm writing the preferences dialog for the tcl/tk interface, and ran
across a policy question that didn't seem to have an obvious answer.

Should changed map view preferences take immediate effect on existing
maps?

Right now the Mac version has the only interface with both a
preferences dialog and menus/buttons setting view options; if you if
you tweak the preferences, they only take effect in the next game you
play.  This is somewhat confusing, and violates the principle of
immediate effect; on the other hand, if you let the preferences have
an immediate effect, they will effectively override any view options
that have been manually set.  This could be annoying for multiple maps
for instance, where each map may have been set up with different view
options. (But perhaps nobody actually uses multiple maps.)

As I poke through other GUI programs, I notice that in nearly all the
cases I find, there is only one control for each option - if something
has a menu option, there is no preference, and vice versa.  The one
exception I've found is syntax coloring in CodeWarrior.  There, each
individual file has syntax coloring enabled by default, but you also
have to enable the global preference to see colors; files for which
syntax coloring has been explicitly disabled are not affected by global
preference tweaking.  This makes sense, but would be a huge pain if
for some reason you only wanted to syntax-color one file in a project
of 50 files (highly unlikely that anyone would want to do this though).

So what should Xconq do for its map view options?

								Stan