Small screens [LWN.net]

Small screens

Posted Mar 24, 2011 15:28 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576)
In reply to: Small screens by baldridgeec
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

>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?

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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.