Re: Modal Dialogs on the Macintosh

[Didier.Guillon@isis.imag.fr (Didier Guillon)]

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Date: Thu, 27 Apr 1995 18:57:54 +0200
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From: poeck@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de (Karsten Poeck)
Subject: Modal Dialogs on the Macintosh
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Karsten Poek write :

>In our group we just finished an application that mainly consists of a
>sequence of modal dialogs.
>
>We had some discussion in the group whether this is allowed by the
>interface guidelines or should be considered poor style.
>
>Can perhaps some point me to the relevant chapter in IM or somewhere else
>to clarify this point
>
>bye
>
>Karsten

As many already underline it (Tom Bonura, Seve Strassman), you have the
Human Interface Guide by Apple Computer, published by Addison-Wesley (with
a CD also in separate offer).

Personnaly, I have to resolve such problem. I already looked and search
around, but not clear answer is delivered. You just be obviously as logical
as possible and do a minimum of modal windows as the user will be faced
with a kind of tree search.

I think this show two problems :

- human cognition management of the modal, in this case you are not anymore
user friendly,

- from the point of view a the programmer, you have different modal
windows, moveable which are new (two or three years only) to the Mac, and
regular standard modal dialogs.

My own thoughts, after a long research for my own code, is that there
should be a way to circumvent the situation. But, in my own case, I had no
solutions.
I think we have to share our kwnowledge on this subject, because it is not
an easy one and I thank you Karsten to talk about it.

Any article, but practical advice would be welcome. Thanks to
Wookye@aol.com for the suggestions already.

Cheers
Didier


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| Didier Guillon |      (33) 76 63 71 57            | Didier.Guillon@imag.fr |
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|  Laboratoire de Mathematiques et Informatique Medical
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|  Universite Joseph Fourier                                                 |
|  Grenoble - France                                                         |
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