Re: User Interface Poll

[bob@fla.fujitsu.com (Bob Carragher)]

Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com> sez:

> I'm writing the preferences dialog for the tcl/tk interface, and ran
> across a policy question that didn't seem to have an obvious answer.
> 
> Should changed map view preferences take immediate effect on existing
> maps?
> 
> Right now the Mac version has the only interface with both a
> preferences dialog and menus/buttons setting view options; if you if
> you tweak the preferences, they only take effect in the next game you
> play.  This is somewhat confusing, and violates the principle of
> immediate effect; on the other hand, if you let the preferences have
> an immediate effect, they will effectively override any view options
> that have been manually set.  This could be annoying for multiple maps
> for instance, where each map may have been set up with different view
> options. (But perhaps nobody actually uses multiple maps.)
> 
> As I poke through other GUI programs, I notice that in nearly all the
> cases I find, there is only one control for each option - if something
> has a menu option, there is no preference, and vice versa.  The one
> exception I've found is syntax coloring in CodeWarrior.  There, each
> individual file has syntax coloring enabled by default, but you also
> have to enable the global preference to see colors; files for which
> syntax coloring has been explicitly disabled are not affected by global
> preference tweaking.  This makes sense, but would be a huge pain if
> for some reason you only wanted to syntax-color one file in a project
> of 50 files (highly unlikely that anyone would want to do this though).
> 
> So what should Xconq do for its map view options?

Well, I have 2 questions in response:

     (1)  Is there any way to change preferences for individual
          maps, rather than all at once?

     (2)  If the answer to (1) is "no," then is there any way
          to warn the user in the dialog box that this will
          affect all maps if accepted?

I also believe in the principle of "immediate effect" in xconq.  If
there is a "warning" message that the user sees before "accepting"
the new preferences, then at least he'll know that this could have
serious consequences for the map views.

Is it possible to have a "preview" function, so that the user can
see what might occur, before "permanently" accepting the change?

Can preferences for different maps be set "relative" to the global
preferences, so that when the global preferences are changed, the
effects in separate maps are not necessarily identical?

				Bob Carragher