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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Enhancement: disable reason
From:       Fred Schaettgen <kde.sch () ttgen ! net>
Date:       2005-07-05 17:05:22
Message-ID: 200507051905.22157.kde.sch () ttgen ! net
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On Tuesday, 5. July 2005 17:02, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've made a patch to help enhance usability: now you can state why you
> disabled some widget.
>
> The patch and some discussion is here:
>
> http://www.qtforum.org/thread.php?sid=&postid=51472
>
>
> What do you think?

Great idea I think :)

I would not include ¨This item is not available for use.¨ each time though. It 
is easy enough to say everything in one short scentence. Besides that ¨item¨ 
instead of ¨button¨, ¨link¨, ¨listbox¨ etc. is too generic, so you better 
leave the wording to the developer and just append the custom disable-reason 
to the original label, just with a different font or in italics maybe.
Does your patch work well if the original tooltip text was richtext already?

Your usage example was widget->disable("you need to select some items"), but 
the argument is called ¨reason¨ and another function call is called 
¨setDisableReason¨. This encourages developers to only tell the user why an 
item was disabled, but not how to enable it. That´s very similar, but not the 
same. A constructive hint more helpful, since you spare the user from doing 
the reasoning himself. And if there are no other unknown conditions that have 
to be met to enable the item, then a constructive hint isn´t more code, just 
another wording.
So how about changing the ¨setDisableReason¨ function (along with the other 
functions and argument names) into ¨setEnableCondition¨, ¨setEnableHint¨ or 
something similar instead?

regards
Fred

-- 
Fred Schaettgen
kde.sch@ttgen.net
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