>>7
So I'm reading a PDF about this thing:
The important part of any user interface toolkit is a mechanism that makes it easy to create interface facilities such as message boxes, e.g. file open and save, color, and font selection.
What. The. Hell. There should be a rule that for every dialog box you put in your program, you have to discard a toe. Displaying the same one twice counts twice. Of all the things that are never, ever good, dialog boxes are them.
First of all, message boxes are amazingly annoying — “Oh hi, I noticed you were trying to do something so I popped up a fucking window with a button that you need to click before you can do your thing.” Second, they're completely inept at their most basic task: ensuring that the user reads the message and takes appropriate action, if any. Hello: make it possible to dismiss dialogs without reading them, and people are going to do it. Display an unintrusive timed message if you have a message to deliver. Then it's actually going to stick around long enough to be read.
And Open/save dialogs? Who thought it was a good idea to completely disable the program when open/saving
and to pop up a gimped mini-filer? If you're going to take over the program, just do it — replace the contents of the program screen with your bad filer. If you're going to think first, just use the normal system filer and let the program alone.
Color or font selection is best accomplished with a less intrusive interface (e.g. a static palette, which while ever-present doesn't mask the work area or disable input to it).
Why am I even reading this? It's like it was designed to make me rage.