On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:27:40 GMT, "David W. Fenton"
<dX********@bway.net.invalid> wrote:
Steve Jorgensen <no****@nospam.nospam> wrote in
news:j7********************************@4ax.com :
What I like about this style of dialog is that it has a good
combination of being noticeable if I care, and not interfering
with the keyboard and mouse actions I am in the middle of while it
pops up since it doesn't steal the focus. The alpha transparency
is a bonus because I can also see to some extent anything in the
same location as the dialog without having to click something to
make the dialog go away.
This is nothing more than a fancy status bar.
I hate those pop-up thingiess -- in any application I can control
it, I turn it off.
I have hated previous incarnations of them. Regardless, I agree it's
important that they can be turned off.
Pegasus has a much better method of notifying you of new mail -- the
little winged horse in the taskbar flaps its wings when new messages
arrive. It's very discreet and doesn't cover up part of your work
area.
The problem is that sometimes you need more detail in a notification than just
the fact that there is a notification, and it's nice if the user doesn't have
to take an action to see that detail. The problem with older popups was that
they required an action if you -don't- want to see them, but the small yellow
popup that opens outside of the normal work area, doesn't steal the focus, and
doesn't need you to dismiss it for it to eventually leav you alone is a pretty
nice model.
The thought I and a friend of mine has to do with error dialogs in Access
applications.
First, we all know by now about trying not making the user click to make came
message dialogs go away, especially when no decision response is required from
the user, but I've also learned from working with my wife's Mac that going all
the way per Alan Cooper can have even bigger problems. I was trying to drag a
song from iTunes into GarageBand, and it simply would not go - it silently
failed.
I read the instructions 20 times more to see if there was something I was
missing, then finally tried to drag some other songs, and most of them went
just fine! What was different about the one that wouldn't go. I finally
solved the problem by renaming the song. It seems that Garage Band won't
accept clips with names longer than some threshold, and since Cooper said the
proper response to an invalid request is to simply do nothing, that's what
garage Band does.
So - the idea, after all of that is that an error that the user can ignore,
but might need to know something about should report something about the
error, but not in a way that forces the user to pay any attention at all if
they don't care. Furthermore, the dialog can show just the most minimal
description of the error condition with a button the user can click if they
happen to want the long explanation.
