RE: A New Keyhole Type!

I certainly agree that that there is no reason that print dialogs should
be modal. It's interesting that the Microsoft development tools make it
much easier to make modal dialogs than modeless ones, and so laziness is
probably a big factor in creating so many of them.
Many of the Inventor modeless dialogs have OK, Cancel, and Apply buttons
(even though they're not property dialogs), because you might want to do
the operation represented by the dialog over and over again to different
parts of an assembly. So you manipulate the part, click Apply, the
operation is applied to the particular part, then you are freed to work
on another part while the modeless dialog is still up, and so on and so
forth until you're done, then you click OK to make the modeless dialog
go away.=20
It's also interesting the Microsoft software (such as Office) is
gradually getting rid of the Apply button from all their property
dialogs, perhaps because they lead to maddening difficulties when people
go crazy with nested modal dialogs containing sub-properties, when the
real problem is using modal dialogs in the first place. I don't think
anyone disputs that modal dialogs are over-used and abused, as has been
pointed out for years. But it seems to me that Microsoft development
tools just encourage this practice.

-----Original Message-----
From: software-keyholes-bounces-xIg/pKzrS18HpDbxM/[email protected]
[mailto:software-keyholes-bounces-xIg/pKzrS18HpDbxM/[email protected]] On Behalf Of Scott
Meyers
Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2005 10:38 AM
To: Software Keyholes; Software Keyholes
Subject: RE: [SK] A New Keyhole Type!

At 08:30 AM 8/25/2005, Frank Paris wrote:
Offhand,
for example, it's not clear to me why a Print Dialog needs to be modal.
I
can imagine a modeless Print Dialog with a checkbox for "close
after each print request," so it'd optionally act much like a modal
dialog,
without the pesky modal part.  But that's just off the top of my head.
There could well be other issues to take into consideration.

Scott

_______________________________________________
software-keyholes mailing list
software-keyholes-xIg/pKzrS18HpDbxM/[email protected]
http://lists.artima.com/mailman/listinfo/software-keyholes