Re: Resizable windows, zoom buttons, & palettes - a GUI design question

On Dec 5, 2009, at 3:02 PM, Kyle Sluder wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 7:37 AM, Eric Gorr <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Now, with that introduction, my specific cases involves a palette with a set of tool buttons. The issue is this:
> 
> So this is like the button bar in Adobe apps?  Or can your panel also
> be used as an inspector?

It would be like the Toolbox in Graphic Converter, without the color picking controls. 

It will not be used as an inspector.

> If it's like the button bar, I wouldn't worry about ever showing the
> zoom button.  I can't think of what would constitute the preferred
> size (which is what the zoom button does; it toggles between preferred
> and user sizes).  You would trade visual consistency for behavioral
> inconsistency.

This is interesting. It would seem to imply there is a fixed set of preferred sizes and, if your window's content doesn't fit nicely into this set, then the zoom button shouldn't be there as the user would be unable to predict what it is going to do. So, what preferred sizes have been discovered? I can think of a couple that would be included:

(1) Dynamic, but limited content, where the zoom button would size the window to be only as big as it needs to be and where the content has a natural flow to it. One example of this would be a window that is displaying a message to the user. The user would be allowed to resize the window, but pressing the zoom button would resize the window to fit all of the text if the user had resized it to be either to small to fit the text or to large. The natural flow of the content in this case would lead one to have the window grow as wide as the display first before increasing in height...at least for those languages that are read horizontally first and not vertically.

(2) Dynamic, but unlimited content, where the zoom button would size the window to be the size of the display. The obvious example here is a text editor where all of the text cannot be shown to the user all at once.

Are there any others?

I am still thinking it is legitimate for a developer to define a standard size for a window and have the zoom button snap to that size. In my case, that might be 2 columns and 4 rows. But, you would disagree, considering it to be a behavioral inconsistency.