Re: Dia's user interface

[Adrien Beau <adrienbeau yahoo com>]

On Sunday 21 April 2002 14:43, Lars Clausen wrote:
>
> If there are any,
> could you point out the worst problems that Dia has in its
> interface?  I'd like to turn some attention to that as we
> work towards a 1.0 release.

It's a minor problem, but it seems to me that "Diagram modified!"
is almost always displayed in the status bar. If I understand
correctly, it is just a file modified indicator.

First error with that: never ever shout at your users. No
exclamation mark. Personnaly, in the few GUIs I've written,
I've only used excl. marks in "impossible case" dialogs
(where assertions would be better, but I don't use Java 1.4
yet). Always be calm and nice to your user. Especially when
there are problems.

Second error with that: it's way too big for its purpose.
It's distracting to have this status message ever present.
Why not do what Vim (and others probably) do? Put a * in
the window title, as in "varicella.dia *", when the file
is modified, remove it when the file is saved or undo
operations bring the diagram back to the state that was
saved (the latter one being not necessarily easy).

-- 
adrienbeau@yahoo.com