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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Enhancement: disable reason
From:       Tim Hutt <tdh29 () cam ! ac ! uk>
Date:       2005-07-11 12:05:01
Message-ID: 200507111305.01796.tdh29 () cam ! ac ! uk
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On Saturday 09 July 2005 12:02, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Saturday 9 July 2005 08:44, Joseph Garvin wrote:
> > >Considering all this, and various details which I'm not going to type
> > > in here, buttons that can't be enabled (in the same piece of
> > > software) should not be visible.
> >
> > You're comparing apples and oranges. In that situation there was, in
> > fact, no way to actually activate the button.
> > In the case of the sleep
>
> Sure it could; as soon as they got a contract to allow that new feature to
> be enabled on our side :-)

Yeah but the user - the person actually using the program - couldn't do 
anything about it. Obviously you shouldn't have buttons for features that 
don't exist yet - that's just stupid.

> > button being greyed out, there _is_ a way to turn sleep on that the
> > user can look into.
>
> Oh?  How?
> Please explain which actions a normal user should do to enable this. Maybe
> I missed something obvious here...

Probably recompile the kernel or something. Don't think sleeping works at all 
well with linux yet - it was just an example.

And to preempt your response, users *are* expected to do complicated things 
like that in order to set other stuff up (eg wireless networking, 3D 
acceleration, TV cards, etc). Hopefully in future this will change.

> > Maybe it'd be better to not grey it out at all, and give an informative
> > popup box describing why it can't be done when they click it? I think
> > they'd read text presented that way.
>
> I can tell you from experience that people won't.

I think they would. Perhaps they'd ignore it the first time but I think they'd 
read it after they realised the sleep button didn't work. Anyone techie 
enough to use KDE definitely would. I don't think the button should be 
enabled however. Then there would be no point to having disabled things at 
all - you'd have to click everthing to see if it was enabled or not.
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