upsets Users for a reason [LWN.net]

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 5:50 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: upsets Users for a reason by tdwebste
Parent article: Ubuntu and window controls

The only thing that sucks is that the 'close window button' is much too close to the edit menu.

People _very_ frequently use that window for all sorts of stuff. Mostly copy-n-pasting. For some people it's one of the more frequently used menus in any application.

Closing out the window is very destructive. Especially since Linux copy-n-paste is broken for non-freedesktop-compliant applications (like firefox and most other browsers). If you copy something and close out a window you lose what your copying.

Putting a destructive item like that just spaced a pixel or 3 away from one of the most frequently utilized UI elements in a application is just not good design.

Going to copy-n-paste and missing the edit menu by mere millimeter of hand movement can mean losing hours of works. Even just minutes of work is extremely bothersome. "Oh, look, I moved my hand by the distance of a hair and now instead of pasting this hour-long message I typed up, I lost everything! Yay!"

You don't need to be a expert in anything to understand that. It's like placing a jar of white powdered rat poison next to the sugar in your cupboard.

As far as Apple goes, it works out just fine because the menu items are not in the window, but at the top of the screen. So there is no conflict like there is for Windows or for Linux.

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upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 9:54 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]

I agree with the main gist of your post, but the part about Apple having a different situations is not entirely true. A huge number of Mac applications have a tool bar stripe right below the window buttons, and tool bars, much like the edit menu, is a very frequently used UI element.

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:00 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> Putting a destructive item like that just spaced a pixel or 3 away from one of the most frequently
> utilized UI elements in a application is just not good design.

Any application that tosses your unsaved changes when you hit the close button, without so much
as prompting you is simply broken...the close button should never actually be destructive.

Of course, do you have a point regarding the interaction between closing a document when it *is*
saved to disk and the completely broken copy/paste implementation that linux prides itself on
having.

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:10 UTC (Thu) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link]

Even when it's a seemingly non-destructive action, it's annoying. If I close a PDF I'm reading, or a web page, I have to find it again (somehow - history in the browser, knowing where it is in the filesystem), and get back to my previous position. I've also lost my train of thought, and have to settle back in, as I've been distracted by finding the document again.

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 27, 2010 9:50 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

> Any application that tosses your unsaved changes when you
> hit the close button, without so much as prompting you is
> simply broken...the close button should never actually be
> destructive.

What a pretty idea.

Unfortunately it runs into trouble when it encounters complex
multipurpose programs like a web browser. If the browser refused to
close because you had a textarea in it that you entered a character
into somewhere, you would not be happy. How about INPUT fields
entered by javascript, or pre-populated by javascript?

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 27, 2010 15:08 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

My browser *does* do that, and I *am* happy. I haven't noticed it having any false positives.

It says:

Are you sure you want to close this window?

You have entered text on Comment editor [LWN.net]. If you close the window, your changes will
be lost. Do you want to close the window anyway?

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