Doug said:
> I’ve always started with the premise, dialogs are bad, especially if they’re modal.
I couldn't agree more. Every dialog box we remove from Eclipse makes it better.
> Non-modal dialogs starts you down the path of having a multi-window application. At one point in history, we decided that was bad. Is that still true?
> Or are non-modal dialogs different enough to escape that criticism.
I'll assume that you meant "more than one window per monitor is bad" rather than the multimonitor-unfriendly variant "more than one window is bad". I wasn't included in that original discussion and am not aware of the justifications presented, but I'd assume that the problem is that the system window manager doesn't benefit from Eclipse's domain-specific knowledge or Eclipse's ability to tile and navigate views and editors, so can't do as good a job of rearranging windows as Eclipse can.
If that's the case, I don't think dialog boxes of any form escape that criticism at all - we can safely say that all dialog boxes are bad.
However, nonmodal dialog boxes reduce the situations in which the user needs to backtrack. They're still awful, but are are marginally better than modal dialog boxes for that reason.
>
By default and without exception, all Wizards are modal. In many cases this is good but sometimes you want to be able to peek in your workspace or preferences.
I challenge the claim that modal wizards are good in many cases. Modality prevents you from interacting with the rest of the app, which causes backtracking every time the user needs to view or copy data from another part of the app into the dialog box. Could you please cite a source - or at least provide a plausible use-case that is improved by modality?
I think the original poster has a point and all wizards should be made nonmodal by default. This isn't nearly as good as eliminating the wizard dialog entirely, but it's an improvement over modal wizards and we should take that step if we can.
- Stefan