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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] "Save ... before ..." dialogs: "Yes/No/Cancel" buttons for a

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 10:50:56 -0700
Bill Meier wrote:

OK: Very good feedback.

How about "Save / Don't Save / Cancel " ??

That's the OS X convention for that case.

The example in the GNOME HIG (figure 3.17 on the GNOME HIG page linked from my previous message) offers "Close without Saving", "Cancel", and "Save"; that seems to be their recommendation.

The KDE HIG offers "Save", "Discard", and "Cancel".

Microsoft's "Commit buttons for indirect dialog boxes" example offers "Save", "Don't Save", and "Cancel".

One slight problem I have with the OS X/Windows convention is that, at least early on using OS X applications, it wasn't *immediately* obvious that "Don't Save" meant "close the window anyway, without saving". From a quick look at the three styles, I might have a *slight* preference for the KDE wording, as it arguably most strongly emphasizes in the text of the button that you're throwing out the data the app has.

However, it might well be that, after you've used a desktop environment for a while, you respond to the wording sub-consciously, and you'd have to stop and think (even if only for a second) when confronted with an unfamiliar button label, so the label used for other apps in the same environment would be best.

Were we to do that, we could do that on Windows (as we can find out whether we're running on Windows at compile time), and (sort-of) do that on OS X ("sort-of" because, for now, we're building with the X11 version of GTK+, so, in theory, it could be running on OS X but displaying on a GNOME or KDE desktop), but KDE vs. GNOME vs. some other environment is trickier.

For now, we can pick one convention, and worry about getting fancier later.