On 10 Sep 2004 13:53:38 +0200, Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dave Neary <dneary@xxxxxxx> writes: > > > You forgot a third solution, proposed in bugzilla, which you said yourself > > wouldn't be too bad [...] > > That provides the affordance for people who want to create images by unit, and > > also allows us to keep the current behaviour for unit changing without > > confusing people too much. > > Apart from the fact that it looks like crap, I'd rather use a dialog that's somewhat less enjoyable asthetically than enjoy a dialog that's somewhat less usable by humans. I don't think I'm unique in that opinion, although I can point you to some apps whose developers obviously disagree. Trying to get anything accomplished with them is almost physically painful, but look! Pretty buttons! > it also looks different > than in all other places where lengths are being entered. If the size > entry looks different than other size entries, how is the user > supposed to understand that it behaves like the others? Perhaps they won't. Perhaps they won't need to. You can't say that it would be particularly surprising to discover it does, or unreasonable to try it out if you need that feature. At any rate, once they learn the first time that it works that way, they will remember it and be able to use it, since unlike the way that the dialog currently works, being able to consistantly use that behavior doesn't require working against the fundamentals of the way our brain is designed. At a more technical level, what I mean by that is that cerebellum is quite capable of finding the nice affordable button with the current unit on it with rather minimal input from the cerebrium; at any rate, no more input than it takes to find the units box normally. It's true that it has to look around a bit longer to find it, but it's even capable of optimizing that to a surprising degree. The reason for the difference is that "convert these numbers to a different unit" is not a task that has years of convention to unlearn, while "fill in the desired information" is. > And why do the other entries look different then? Ony the terminally nitpicky would even notice. The terminally nitpicky probably have bigger fish to fry. Rockwalrus
