Small screens [LWN.net]

Small screens

Posted Mar 23, 2011 1:13 UTC (Wed) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283)
In reply to: Small screens by cesarb
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

> But one place where it is much worse is that modal dialogs seem to be "stuck" to some place in the screen and unmovable (and their top is not even near the top of the screen, there is a lot of vertical space wasted). So, if a modal dialog is too tall, the only way you can change things on the lower part of it is by blindly using the keyboard.

That's awful, to be sure, but one thing I personally find horrifying is that there are modal dialogs. Isn't it basically stated in the GNOME 2.x HID guidelines that if you (as an application developer) are thinking about making your dialog modal, you should stop and rethink, as they are never the right idea?

Modal dialogs are part of what makes Microsoft Windows unusable as a desktop environment. I have to work with Windows almost every day at work, due to some specialized (and closed-source) applications we use in our field.

I used to give Windows the benefit of the doubt, saying "well, I haven't used it since Windows 95. It can't still be that bad - surely they've made SOME strides in usability?" Then I got a job that involved actually working with it. Wow. Was I ever wrong.

I can't begin to describe the little frustrations that come into play every single day. They become less surprising after a while, but I can tell they're still just as irritating by how tight my back and neck muscles are after I get home from work. Modal dialogs are one of the worst ideas ever dreamed up for a user interface. Please tell me they're still strongly recommended against. If it turns out that they are now encouraged (or even tolerated) I will have to sit quietly and weep in mourning for a better world.

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Small screens

Posted Mar 23, 2011 1:27 UTC (Wed) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]

As an aside, I really liked the early stuff I saw in gnome-shell. If they hadn't removed it from the Ubuntu repository for Natty I'd be looking at it right now to see if it was really as bad as it sounds. I looked at Unity for about 30 seconds, but it seems to be essentially a poor-man's gnome-shell.

So I'm not a hater - even though I can't test (easily) at my desktop right now I'd love to. But I deal with poor UI often enough at work; I don't want to come home to it as well, nor to work in an environment made solely of worse UI than I'm used to seeing in GNOME 2.

Small screens

Posted Mar 24, 2011 15:28 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>Modal dialogs are part of what makes Microsoft Windows unusable as a desktop environment. I have to work with Windows almost every day at work, due to some specialized (and closed-source) applications we use in our field.

>I used to give Windows the benefit of the doubt, saying "well, I haven't used it since Windows 95. It can't still be that bad

While I don't disagree with the general gist of your point, it sounds like you are expecting newer versions of Windows to have somehow forced all applications not to have modal dialogs, which is surely impossible?

Small screens

Posted Mar 24, 2011 18:43 UTC (Thu) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]

No, of course not - but there is the matter of the HID guidelines. If Microsoft has also put out a document strongly recommending against modal dialogs and application developers just ignore it, well, at least they tried right? I've never heard such a thing, but then, I haven't looked for it either.

But I know that the number of modal dialogs I see per week on my Linux desktop can be numbered in the single digits, if at all. The number of times I've needed to find some data in a parent window before answering a question asked in a child window - and been unable to because I can't interact with the parent at all while the child is open... countless on Windows. Regardless of the cause, the effect as a whole is the same.