Re: Dialog Boxes

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From: Michael G Schwern
Subject: Re: Dialog Boxes
Date: 22:22 on 03 Nov 2003
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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