Re: Customize buttons that change user's custom fileshouldaskforconfirmation

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

I lost the CC's im my original reply to Lennart:

Lennart Borgman wrote:

   I agree with your points, but is not this the case with most options
   dialoges? I myself have often found that I have lost track of what I am
   doing in those dialoges in other applications. To be sure to avoid trouble I
   then hit Cancel and start it over again.

You mean that each time I have to set an option in Custom, I would
have to first enter a key sequence or hit a button in a header line to
cancel all previous edits, then I set my value as I do now, then I hit
another key sequence or click another button in the header line to
save it?  This does not appear to be a simplification of the current
situation to me.  I believe it would be very easy to occasionally
forget the first step.

How are you going to reset the value to standard, with the new design?
One definitely wants to reset a single option to standard, not
everything in the buffer.  Being able to easily set an option back to
standard is important to everybody, but especially to novices.  It
seem that you will still need the individual State buttons, even with
the new design.

It all looks like a completely unnecessary complication of things.
People are inevitably going to give up on the first step in the
tedious three step sequence and, inevitably, they are going to sooner
or later get burned by that.

If one really would want to get rid of the State buttons (which the
new design can not do), one could replace the individual State buttons
with individual rows of four buttons:

SAVE || RESET TO SAVED ||  RESET TO STANDARD || ADVANCED

where ADVANCED would contain the remainder of the current options
listed in State, that is, ADVANCED would still work like the current
STATE, but can be ignored unless needed.  RESET TO SAVED and RESET TO
STANDARD are an important rescue tool if you messed up.

The only argument I have yet seen against single option buttons is
that people are not used to it.  It does not take a gigantic mental
effort to get used to it, and it makes things a lot simpler and a lot
less error prone.

If Custom is hard to understand for other reasons, we could worry
about those.  But to me, it seems ridiculous to claim that single
option buttons are a difficult to grasp concept.

Sincerely,

Luc.