What is the suggested user interface when creating modal dialogs
for documents that have be movable? For our application (think of
it as a drawing program), the user sometimes NEEDS to be able to
view the document under the modal dialog. We can not use sheets,
because they cover up the document window itself. We can not do
Inspectors, since the operations are intensely modal. We could
make the dialog box application modal (ie. one at any given time),
but our client has really requested document modal, since they are
often working with more then one document at the same time. I know
how to write and invoke the code to make any given window modal to
another, but I am more concerned about the user interface of this.
Is there any suggested way to do this? Something to clue the user
to what is going on?
Hi,
ideally, you'd get rid of the modality, which is often possible.
Failing that, I would probably duplicate the window contents in a
sheet. I.e. the sheet is huge, maybe even resizable, and contains a
(possibly collapsible) preview area holding the document contents.
That way, the user gets the window-modal UI they're familiar with,
plus the preview they need.
Alternately, you could switch your whole window into a special mode
and just have all UI elements that don't apply disable themselves, and
"scroll in" an area somewhere that allows for that modal operation.
But I've found that in most cases, things that have been made window-
modal can easily be made non-modal, with some careful coding. If you
could provide more detail, maybe we could help better.
Feel free to take this to the Mac-GUI-Dev mailing list, by the way
(URL in the footer).
Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mac-gui-dev/
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