Re: User Interface Poll

[Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>]

   Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 18:49:36 +0100
   From: Hans Ronne <hronne@2.sbbs.se>

   As a mac user (mainly) I'm perhaps biased, but I think the mac interface
   with separate preferences and view settings works just fine. There are
   certain view settings, such as the magnification, that you change a lot during
   a game, but you wouldn't like to change your default startup conditions every
   time you are zooming in or out.

That's very true.  I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be separate
preferences and per-map viewing settings, that's clearly a desirable
feature.  However, it's important to define how they interact; the
current Mac behavior of not taking effect until the next map is opened
is somewhat unusual.  You can find commercial programs that behave that
way with some of their preferences, but it's rare and usually only shows
up in difficult cases.  For instance, Photoshop has a hook to set prefs
for plugins, but has an explicit warning that the settings won't take
effect right away - not too surprising because Adobe doesn't know what
all plugins are out there...

   Anyway, I think separate preferences and view settings is better simply because
   it gives the user maximum freedom to configure things the way he wants it. One
   could always add a Windows type "Apply" button to the tcltk prefs dialog in
   order
   to make the changes take immediate effect.

That's true.  I've read in a couple places that users get confused by
dialogs that have both "Apply" and "OK" buttons, especially if "OK"
doesn't mean "Apply then close dialog".  (Certainly I've been confused
by them in Word and PowerPoint.)  One of the barriers to Xconq is that
it's become very hard for new users to learn, so I'd like to reverse
the trend and make the interface simpler whenever possible.  While it's
cool to have a program that only PhDs can understand :-), it cuts way
down on the player base...

								Stan