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On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 12:40:06PM -0500, Phil!Gregory wrote:
> Dialog boxes are pretty simple creatures. They have some text and some
> buttons. Sometimes the text asks you to make a decision, and press
> different buttons based on your decision. Sometimes the labels on the
> buttons bear *no* resemblance to the actions they perform.
>
> I'm not talking about buttons that outright lie; fortunately, they're
> pretty rare. But in Windows, it's very easy to create dialog boxes with
> "standard" buttons, like "Yes", "No", "OK", and "Cancel". This leads to
> error messages like "The program has died unexpectedly. Press OK to quit
> and Cancel to debug." Oh, yes, "Cancel" is so much like "debug" in
> meaning. Thanks, Microsoft. (Yes, this was a Windows 2000 error.)
Two complete asides here.
Spaceward Ho! has an Armageddon option to destroy half the universe during
a game. In older versions the dialog was something like this:
------------------------------
| Are you sure you want to |
| destroy the universe? |
| |
| [Unsure] [Not Unsure] |
------------------------------
Unfortunately, they changed the armageddon rules in the latest versions so
that dialog is gone. :(
The other is something MJD was telling me about after YAPC in St. Louis.
It was a solution for the problem of user confusion where they hit [No] but
they meant to hit [Yes].
---------------------------------------------------------
| Would you like to delete your hard drive? |
| |
| [Yes] [No] [Yes but I mean No] [No but I mean Yes] |
---------------------------------------------------------
--
Michael G Schwern schwern@xxxxx.xxx http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid.
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