Brian, There are two problems with this dialog, one small, one bigger. The small problem, easily corrected, is that it's too small and you didn't leave space for possible differences in fonts between platforms or translated text that takes up more horizontal space than English. Consideration for both of those things are part of normal dialog box design. The horizontal space take up by the button is completely wasted. Why not widen the button and put the label on it as a caption the way buttons normally do? Then set the dialog's font to Arial 10 or 11 and everything will be fine on both Windows and OS X. Well, almost...
The bigger problem is that this dialog doesn't make much sense. At first glance I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to do until I realized that the little squares were buttons. But without captions. And a Save button in the list there too? Very odd and dare I say non-standard. Maybe a toolbar at the top would do better. Then standardize the menus and use the toolbar for all manipulation rather than a combination of menu bar items and popup dialog. Thanks. -Phil ________________________________________ From: Brian Prentice [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 5:48 PM To: Lazarus mailing list Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Lazarus Goal My point about showing the differences in the dialogs, one acceptable and one clearly not acceptable, is that the solution seems to require the construction of two dialogs one for OS X and one for WindowsXP. Perhaps I'm wrong here but if I'm right this violates the Lazarus and FPC goal of write once. I don't want to start a war here but as you probably know Java has solved this problem nicely with layout managers. If layout managers were implemented in Lazarus the IDE would also be simpler, an additional advantage. Earlier in this thread it was stated that when designing an application consideration should be given to the differences in the underlying operating systems. This might be true but if you do this you severly weaken the stated goal which would then read something like: 'Lazarus and Free Pascal aim to be write once, compile anywhere for those programs which only use the supported operating system features that share a common design'. Surely a better approach for Lazarus and FPC is to hide operating system difference from users. Brian -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
