The version of Notepad2 that I am running (2.0.1.6) uses the “I don’t want to see this anymore” method. It gave me the “Reached the end…Restarting…” message along with a “Don’t display this message again” check box. I’ve noticed the same tactic for the “The specified text was not found” message.
I do think that message boxes are are overused, in general. Though, there are cases where I still do like them.
I’m typically a fan of “dirty” checks on close: “Did you mean to save those changes you made?”.
I also tend to favor “double checks” for things that could be really annoying: “Doing this is going to take a long time, and will probably slow your computer down to a crawl. Are you sure about this?”
Much of the time, using some type of “Stop showing me this annoying message” option can make it all better.
(I kind of like the delete confirmation dialog boxes; I’m operating on a system with low disk resources, so Recycle Bin is configured to remove files immediately.)
My primary modal dialog hatred is currently reserved fro the macro warning dialog in Excel. I use a couple of ~4MB spreadsheets for social sports organisation. These take around 10s to load on our sucky network (nominally 10Mb/s - yeah, right), which is enough time for me to switch contexts. And then the Excel macro warning dialog pops up, interrupting what I was doing. Because it’s soooo important, it needs not just an app modal dialog, it needs a SYSTEM model dialog. Excel, go die!!!
Bah.
Anyway - IMO, the best searching UI is the one in Firefox. None of the other apps I use regularly comes close to the easy slickness of Firefox’s wee search bar.
My primary modal dialog hatred is currently reserved fro the macro warning dialog in Excel. I use a couple of ~4MB spreadsheets for social sports organisation. These take around 10s to load on our sucky network (nominally 10Mb/s - yeah, right), which is enough time for me to switch contexts. And then the Excel macro warning dialog pops up, interrupting what I was doing. Because it’s soooo important, it needs not just an app modal dialog, it needs a SYSTEM model dialog. Excel, go die!!!
Bah.
Anyway - IMO, the best searching UI is the one in Firefox. None of the other apps I use regularly comes close to the easy slickness of Firefox’s wee search bar.
As long as we’re fixing Notepad2’s Find dialog, can we have Alt+n be a keyboard shortcut to set the focus to the dialog’s Find field, as is standard in most MS Windows apps (Visual Studio, Word, Excel, IE… and even plain old notepad.exe)?
Right now, Notepad2 doesn’t seem to have a hotkey to set the focus to the Find field in the Find dialog. My natural workflow when I bring up a Find when I know I want to search backwards tends to be to first hit Alt+u to set “search up,” and then fill in the text that I want to search for. In Notepad2, I either have to Tab or Shift+Tab, or reach for the mouse, to get back to the Find field.
I think that dialog boxes are handy when you need the user’s attention and selection of choices that do not belong to the user interface properly. But sometimes there really are too much dialog boxes. One really annoying thing is a layout of a search dialog that is badly designed. Like when the search results pop up into the dialog and the dialog is huge. Also it is annoying if the search dialog hides the text so that I have to move the dialog in order to see the text itself.
One other annoying thing are tooltips. There are just too many of them and they are nowadays popping up immediately so that when you move the mouse pointer, there flashes lots of tips around. The tooltips hide some text that you would like to see. And there are lots of tooltips that give zero information. I tried to adjust the Windows registry, but it didn’t help.
In search dialog, I like to give the direction sometimes. If I know that the searched text is quite near above, then I mark “up”, and if the file is really long, then I find the next text above. Sometimes I actually need the next above, even if it is upwards far away. So, the dialog has some search options, that I need sometimes and sometimes not. For example when I go to store and if I know that the book I want is in a certain shelf and if I suspect that the sales person is looking it from a wrong place, then I ask to look in the right shelf. Human clerks and sales persons do not have search options visible like dialogs have, but humans do understand the extra options I give them. Dialogs need the options visible, because it is easier for user to know what are the options that the function supports. Also dialogs can have the More…-button.
If computer file systems had a organizing plan that user could create, then the computer could use that information in file searching. But there usually are only MyDocuments, MyMusic and MyPicture -folders, where the computer can start searching unless otherwise instructed for C:\something. Well, in VS there is this “goto declaration”. That knows what we are looking and goes upwards first.
Merle,
Well a delete confirmation is a little more important. It is not non-sensical. Telling a user that it is relooping is silly, the user REALLY didn’t need to know that…however alerting the user to the fact that a search has completed is not non-sensical either. It lets the user know the search is complete without any doubt. Similar to how some vb scripters might use a ‘wscript.echo “here”’ to see whether their code is being executed or conditions are being met as expected.
It just lets you know its done and don’t bother waiting or wondering anymore, which I think can be a worse groove buster that a ringing telephone.
I’ve got a use case for modal dialogs that nobody on this blog has mentioned yet:
AUTHENTICATION
The number of times I’ve been working at customer sites where they’ve got an application where someone logs in once and then has free unfettered access to the entire system until they close the application.
Which is great, unless the PC is shared by a number of users, who by reason of convenience never close the application, and never log out.
The only way to resolve this potential security risk is to slam on the brakes and throw up a login box at the point where someone’s about to commit a change and you need explicit confirmation of who’s committing it.
If you can present a modal dialog for a PIN / token / fingerprint challenge then that’s better than simply chucking up a password box, obviously.
Especially those error messages that said something prevented a backup or whatever from completing - or that it failed because of an unexpected error. Like that tells the user a lot. Something failed, but we’re not telling why it did or what caused it. If “it” knows why the program failed, it should just say so. Not much has changed in the past 20-30 years.