Re: modal dialogs

Somewhere on Shadow Earth, at Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 09:00:43AM -0700, Frank Paris wrote:
> Most of the time they are necessary to avoid confusing the user. I
> started looking at various applications and noticed that theoretically
> the various dialogs could come up modeless but if they did you could
> wind up with dialogs all over the place and lose track of their
> relationships, i.e. where they came from and what problem they were
> supposed to solve.
<snip>

I would encourage you to take a look at Mac OS X's "sheets". They
are little modal dialogs that attach to one window. In other words,
the application isn't stopped dead just because one window wants
you to make a decision about it. For example, in the Safari browser,
when a page load times out, that window drops down a sheet saying
something like "Page could not be loaded after 60 seconds." with
an acknowledgment button. So THAT window is in a mode, in that I
must respond before I can continue using that one window, but the
other windows in the app respond normally. Nice improvement.
-- 
Timothy Knox  <mailto:tdk-cm3xKafaMiJWk0Htik3J/[email protected]>
Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd
be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper
armour and shouting "All gods are bastards."
	-- Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic