Visual and Code

The ribbon Gui is pretty nice for the new Office, but I’m really really surprised over how much pop-ups and small dialogs that are still there. More and more programs seems to find new and improved ways of dealing with info and questions that were previously solved by message boxes, i.e. Firefox and IE7. And when it comes to small dialogs, I think Paint.Net is really cute.
As a stupid example of how not to use message boxes (seriously, the tester/developer/QM that passed this part of the program should be sacked, or at least be forced to read Cooper’s About Face 2.0) here is a mbox that I got when saving a word file.

In my work I really hate to have to use a mbox. Every time I make a mbox, I think of other ways to layout the program and interaction in such a way that the mbox can be avoided. If it has to be there, I make it a rich and informative one (Cooper have a great example of this as well I might add). The above example was followed by a dialog that was a little more informative, but still, why use it in the first place? And more, I think that the common M$ dialogs and boxes are way to wide, which make them hard to read. I guess this is because they open them up programatically, and the standard layout engine just extends the dialog till the text fits.

My Try

I have tried to solve this, and loan some ideas from Cooper. For instance, when importing Virtual Slides into BioPix iQ, I have a dialog that shows only if there was an error. Clicking a filename for a slide that could not be properly imported, the error for that slide is presented. And if the name is double-clicked the image is opened for viewing. For the message boxes that I do have, I have set a maximum width, for readability.

Now, I won’t claim this is a super duper dialog, but it’s a hundred years better than the stupid “ERROR ERROR!” dialog from Word 2007.

And in SharpWired

This discussion about error messaging and feedback to user is something that we will take quite seriously in SharpWired (which recently got a logo. yayhh!). We have some ideas, of which one is to put all errors in a tab, almost like a chat window. Probably also using the drop-down style of Firefox and IE for some notices. The thing is that very many errors don’t have to be intrusive, and since chatting and file loading is completely asynchronic, why should the errors be blocking?!