• Pokemom (unregistered) in reply to futurama anyone?
    futurama anyone?:
    Dustin_00:
    Don't click any of those Wizard dialog buttons!

    The Internet Wizard will never let you cancel your subscription!

    Sure, blame the wizards!

    Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle, and prone to bugs...

  • net-send (unregistered) in reply to T$
    T$:
    The second box I can see happening. Someone didn't test enough to make sure the label was large enough for the text. Happens to the best of us.
    Actually, any static size could fail there. What you need is to use some function like GetTextExtent32 to find the actual size needed, as the bit in the middle, the path, can be of any length (within reasonable limits). Heck, I use dynamic sizing on nearly all my text labels, as internationalization can grow or shrink labels by a large amount. Of course, this case is a bit harder, since you have to size the dialog as well (keeping in mind the size of all other controls), and at some point, sanity checks are needed to prevent Gigantor the Dialog Box.
  • semi (unregistered) in reply to GeekGirl
    GeekGirl:
    The #2 example happens for every single dialog box I get for Adware on my computer. The dialog buttons are also cut off, so I can't tell what I'm agreeing or not agreeing to make changes to my computer's registry. It's pretty much useless right now.

    CAPTCHA - muhahahaha - describes my day so far!

    Thats an issue with your DPI setting on your display being different from what they expect. Supposedly Vista (or OS X for that matter)'s method of scaled rendering fixes this, but I havn't tested either.

    You could change this setting by right clicking on your desktop and going to properties, settings tab and click advanced. Then on the general tab theres a DPI setting up top. You're probably using 120DPI which is likely best and accurate to your monitor, but if you set it to 96 DPI it will fix the problem and leave you with small barely readable text. Might be worth it if you REALLY need to see the rest of a window.

    Computers are awesome.

  • Locke (unregistered) in reply to BestSnowman
    BestSnowman:
    X Cancel or Cancel? Who would think of that??

    Square/Enix would! I bet it's like the difference between a potion and an x-potion. Just so you all know, x-potions are better, but x-parrots are not. People complain WAY too much about them and start saying stupid crap about the fjords.

  • CastrTroy (unregistered)
    Kind of like the good old EXTREMELY FATAL program uninstallation error - "This program cannot be uninstalled because the file deletion operation failed: The file being deleted, X, doesn't exist."

    I get this kind of message all the time when I try stop services on windows. The message is usually something like, "Error stopping this service, the process terminated unexpectedly."

  • (cs) in reply to Sgt. Preston
    Sgt. Preston:
    "Yes" and "No" are sometimes appropriate, but whenever I can, I use words such as Print Report, Clear Files, Submit Request, Purchase This Item, Close Window, Cancel Downloading, Save Changes, Publish, Start Back-up, etc.
    I thought this was a fantastic idea until I started using Macs. Then I realized that I had to spend about five times as much time reading dialogs where on Windows I would just hit y, n, o, or c (or escape) on the keyboard. Keyboard is made just as slow as the mouse, if you can find any keyboard shortcuts at all. (For some reason, OS X tends to ignore escape, though linux usually maps it to cancel when something like that is available.)

    For multiple choice questions it's a no-brainer though. I'll take anything over "yes, no, close, cancel".

    semi:
    Thats an issue with your DPI setting on your display being different from what they expect. Supposedly Vista (or OS X for that matter)'s method of scaled rendering fixes this, but I havn't tested either.
    Only if they actually use WPF. Vista can't work magic with the CRT libs, unless it wants to piss off all the devs who've made functional dialogs. Of course, I've known plenty of developers who consider "granny fonts" an affront and tell people they should just use glasses. =p

    I love Oracle, almost as much of a punching bag as old Lotus Notes.

  • Simetrical (unregistered) in reply to foxyshadis

    As any GNOME user should have been able to spot, that first dialog box is in fact GNOME. Google would have shown it too, with the first hit being l10n.gnome.org and the second being an Ubuntu bug report that was marked fixed within a day of being reported. And yes, as a GNOME user I immediately understood that the left button (standard GNOME cancel button in the standard place) would not cancel current downloads, the button on the right (standard place for "yes") would. Still pretty silly, yeah. :)

    foxyshadis:
    Sgt. Preston:
    "Yes" and "No" are sometimes appropriate, but whenever I can, I use words such as Print Report, Clear Files, Submit Request, Purchase This Item, Close Window, Cancel Downloading, Save Changes, Publish, Start Back-up, etc.
    I thought this was a fantastic idea until I started using Macs. Then I realized that I had to spend about five times as much time reading dialogs where on Windows I would just hit y, n, o, or c (or escape) on the keyboard. Keyboard is made just as slow as the mouse, if you can find any keyboard shortcuts at all. (For some reason, OS X tends to ignore escape, though linux usually maps it to cancel when something like that is available.)

    For multiple choice questions it's a no-brainer though. I'll take anything over "yes, no, close, cancel".

    I have to agree that I prefer to read a yes/no question and then immediately just click yes/no/cancel (or hit the appropriate key) as in Windows. GNOME basically requires that you read all the actual values on the dialog buttons in addition to reading the dialog itself, which is okay for complicated choices (like the "run in terminal/display/cancel/run" dialog for double-clicking a text executable, which someone mentioned) but annoying for simple ones.

  • (cs)

    Actually, with that first dialog, the button you press is the less decorated "Cancel". They may have constructed complete gibberish, but they were kind enough to stick to the human interface guidelines and put the positive answer on the right. X Cancel would have been the wise one to press, though; cancelling downloads is high stakes stuff.

  • (cs) in reply to foxyshadis
    foxyshadis:
    I thought this was a fantastic idea until I started using Macs. Then I realized that I had to spend about five times as much time reading dialogs where on Windows I would just hit y, n, o, or c (or escape) on the keyboard.
    I speak mostly for Mac OS 9 and earlier, where return or enter (totally different keys on the Mac) for OK and escape (or cmd-.) for cancel do work and have done for a very long time. I don't recall Mac OS X ever making this a problem for me though.

    However, dialogs where Cancel is both default and cancel -- i.e. Cancel is the button on the right -- do then become a tricksy jobby. You may find that pressing the key corresponding to the first letter of the left button's caption works (as it does in many apps). Officially, Mac OS 9 and earlier require cmd to be held to press a message dialog button, but most apps don't, the same as how Windows does not require alt for button accelerators in message dialogs. Mac OS X now does require it.

    Now, Mac OS X improves on this. If you turn on keyboard control navigation, then dialogs have the default button pulsating blue and the cancel button focused. Return/enter will press the default, esc will cancel, and space will take the secondary action since that button is focused (if there's more than one button, cycle to it with tab). It can take Sega to get used to having the focus on a non-default button, as that's not possible in Windows.

    (Full control focus like Windows/X11 is off by default in OS X, and only works in Cocoa apps, or system-managed dialogs in Carbon apps. I think it can work in Carbon apps if you're willing to take on more effort to support it.)

  • Cheong (unregistered) in reply to James
    James:
    No, see, they're asking if you want to Cancel the current downloads, or Cancel the Canceling of the current downloads. Makes perfect sense.
    Yes. There is 3 hints: 1) The "Cancel" without "X" is the default button, and windows dialogs defaults on "Cancel". 2) The "X Cancel" button is clearly not a default style while the other "Cancel" is default style. So "X Cancel" must be the mb_Ok one. 3) It does confirm with the "confirm on left" UI rule.

    And as of any time, if a "x" button is on upper-left corner and you're not sure what it does, it's "cancel". So actually there's 3 "cancel" button on the dialog. :P

  • Lolerskatus (unregistered) in reply to Cairnarvon

    Then perhaps, just maybe, you see the problem.

  • Visual Studio (unregistered) in reply to RogerC
    RogerC:
    Attendant: "Coffee?" Developer: "OK." Attendant: "Cream or sugar?" Developer: "Cancel."

    Attendant: [silence for 3 minutes] Attendant: Unhandled exception in 0x00931745. Symbols not available, following stack frames might be corrupt.

  • Visual Studio (unregistered) in reply to T$
    T$:
    The third dialog I'm just going to ignore, I can't ever imagine seeing that in the wild. Not only does it not make sense, but its creator didn't even bother to align the controls correctly. I guess I didn't ignore it after all...

    The third dialog probably had the controls positioned by some calculation depending on the length and width of the text being displayed. The text was loaded from a resource-only DLL. The developer was still waiting for the translator to provide the text, so the length and width were 0.

  • BillyBob (unregistered) in reply to James

    No, see, they're asking if you want to Cancel the current downloads, or Cancel the Canceling of the current downloads. Makes perfect sense.

    Now which button does which? :-)

  • (cs) in reply to samson goretusk
    samson goretusk:
    God, you people put way too much thought into dialog #1. If you want to cancel downloads hit "enter," if you want to kill the dialog hit "esc" ... Mice are for pansies.

    If the non-destructive action needs to be default than enter and escape will do the same, which for example isn't possible in .NET, a Form (Window) has an AcceptButton (Triggers on Enter) and CancelButton (Triggers on Escape) property.

  • Izzy (unregistered) in reply to Visual Studio
    RogerC:
    Attendant: "Coffee?" Developer: "OK." Attendant: "Cream or sugar?" Developer: "Cancel."

    Attendant: "Passenger full. Ejecting." Developer: "Aieeeeeee!"

  • Bram Stoker (unregistered) in reply to T$
    T$:
    The second box I can see happening. Someone didn't test enough to make sure the label was large enough for the text. Happens to the best of us.
    I don't understand this at all. This happens often with translated products. Perhaps it's just how every SDK does error messages.

    There are three (imo both very annoying and easy to fix) problems with standard error boxes:

    • they are not resizeable (as we notice here)
    • you cannot copy the text (to say, google it)
    • they are modal (so you cannot look back at what you where doing, or google it if it's your browser presenting the error)
  • (cs) in reply to Mr. Picklesworth
    Mr. Picklesworth:
    Actually, with that first dialog, the button you press is the less decorated "Cancel". They may have constructed complete gibberish, but they were kind enough to stick to the human interface guidelines and put the positive answer on the right
    Yeah, and I still wonder which idiot thought up that HIG - it goes against every other software on PCs, including GTK+ 1.x programs. And feels unnatural.
  • (cs) in reply to ender
    ender:
    Mr. Picklesworth:
    Actually, with that first dialog, the button you press is the less decorated "Cancel". They may have constructed complete gibberish, but they were kind enough to stick to the human interface guidelines and put the positive answer on the right
    Yeah, and I still wonder which idiot thought up that HIG - it goes against every other software on PCs, including GTK+ 1.x programs. And feels unnatural.

    On the contrary, I wonder why Windows goes against almost every HIG on the planet by placing positive answer on left. =)

    And by the way, GTK+ 1.x did not have a guideline on placing positive answer on left; people just did what they were used to at the time, and that could have been the Windows way. GTK+ doesn't have any preference either way, and GTK+ 1.x didn't even have standard dialogs in the first place (those were introduced in 2.x, taken from GNOME). As far as I know, it was GNOME project that came up with any HIG for GTK+ apps in the first place, and they've done positive-on-right as long as I can remember.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to Still too lazy to log in
    Still too lazy to log in:
    BestSnowman:
    X Cancel or Cancel? Who would think of that??
    From my experience with an Alcatel phone (where instead of Yes/No or OK/Cancel they had OK/OK where one of the OKs has a line through it), I'd say that X Cancel means 'do not cancel'.

    French phone => french logic. Mkay?

  • (cs)

    My favourite was at a City bank, to with managing an entity called a "Cancel Trade" (no, I don't really know what that is either). "Do you want to cancel the Cancel - Yes/No/Cancel". Headexplode.

  • mabinogi (unregistered) in reply to nevyn
    nevyn:
    RogerC:
    The first one asks, "Really cancel all running transfers?" The ONLY suitable answers to this question are "Yes" and "No". How hard is that?

    /No, absolutely not!/ 'Yes' and 'No' are horrible dialog buttons. Verbs, maaan! "Abort downloads" and "Continue downloading" would be better.

    It's this absolutist thinking that brought us the Cancel Cancel dialog in the first place. Admitedly it's a slight misunderstanding of the thinking that caused it, but I'd still blame it on blind adherence to the Gnome "verb dialog buttons" policy.

    If the dialog is asking a yes/no question, the buttons should be yes/no answers.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    This much is definitely true: the Cancel Cancel situation is stupid, and if your users are using the relative positions of the buttons to work out which one does which, you've probably failed anyway.

    Also I just want to thank the submitter; this is the first Error'd at which I've LOL'd in a while. gets mauled by apostrophes

  • (cs) in reply to Cheong
    Cheong:
    Yes. There is 3 hints: 1) The "Cancel" without "X" is the default button, and windows dialogs defaults on "Cancel". 2) The "X Cancel" button is clearly not a default style while the other "Cancel" is default style. So "X Cancel" must be the mb_Ok one. 3) It does confirm with the "confirm on left" UI rule.

    And as of any time, if a "x" button is on upper-left corner and you're not sure what it does, it's "cancel". So actually there's 3 "cancel" button on the dialog. :P

    Impressive (and possibly intentional? My sarcasm detector is broken): you actually managed to get all three lines of reasoning backwards; the button with the "X" is highlighted as default in the screenshot (look at the colouring), GNOME guidelines place "OK" on the right and "Cancel" on the left (on Western systems), and the default cancel button has an "X" in gnome.
  • Nate (unregistered)

    So the only thing that springs to my mind is Xcancel, is that anything at all like Xemacs or Xwindows?

  • Eric (unregistered)

    Thanks for the laugh...

  • LionsPhil (unregistered)

    The two-cancels thing is a standard GTK+ dialogue being used stupidly. The "X Cancel" will be the true "Cancel this dialogue" button (the stock icon gives it away), and the other one will be the affirmative action button, with the custom text "Cancel".

    Presumably, the affirmative is to the cancel the download.

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to foxyshadis
    foxyshadis:
    Sgt. Preston:
    "Yes" and "No" are sometimes appropriate, but whenever I can, I use words such as Print Report, Clear Files, Submit Request, Purchase This Item, Close Window, Cancel Downloading, Save Changes, Publish, Start Back-up, etc.
    I thought this was a fantastic idea until I started using Macs. Then I realized that I had to spend about five times as much time reading dialogs where on Windows I would just hit y, n, o, or c (or escape) on the keyboard. Keyboard is made just as slow as the mouse, if you can find any keyboard shortcuts at all. (For some reason, OS X tends to ignore escape, though linux usually maps it to cancel when something like that is available.)

    For multiple choice questions it's a no-brainer though. I'll take anything over "yes, no, close, cancel".

    Actually, in OS X, you can enable full keyboard access so you can tab to buttons and pick boxes and such - you just have to enable it from (I believe) the keyboard control panel. It's a radio button that says "full keyboard mode". Trips up anyone who uses Windows, usually...

  • (cs) in reply to XIU
    XIU:
    samson goretusk:
    God, you people put way too much thought into dialog #1. If you want to cancel downloads hit "enter," if you want to kill the dialog hit "esc" ... Mice are for pansies.

    If the non-destructive action needs to be default than enter and escape will do the same, which for example isn't possible in .NET, a Form (Window) has an AcceptButton (Triggers on Enter) and CancelButton (Triggers on Escape) property.

    That is not true. Yes, forms do have those properties available, but they are not automatically the defaults, and they aren't required to be set (they can be null). If my form does not have a cancel button, there is no cancel action. Furthermore, you can capture whatever keypress you want to take whatever action you want.

    The operating system has basically nothing to do with the behavior of a form - that's up to the application programmer. It only has a bearing on system dialogs.

  • peterchen (unregistered)

    "the real wtf on the second dialog"

    Is not the truncated text. To put it into context: Installshield setups give you this message e.g. when it has to overwrite or delete a read-only file.

    Problems: First, in most cases it's a decision the end user cannot possibly make. Second, it doesn't tell you what exactly is happening - so even if the user would call help desk instantly, and helpdesk would be manned by the local Installshield wizard, he couldn't help. Third, the wording is an insult to usability and the user.

    Oh yeah, the partial text. Solution: read-only EDIT control with vertical scrollbar. Or use a goddamn standard message box.

    captcha: bathe - no thank you.

  • kastein (unregistered) in reply to net-send

    scrollbars?

    all very amusing, and actually useful to a discussion we were just having at work. glad I came here on my lunch break :) Also, gigantor the dialog box cracked me up.

  • kastein (unregistered) in reply to Bram Stoker

    (at least in windows, with standard error boxes) if you hit ctrl-c the entire contents of the box will be copied to the clipboard. No need to select the text, as you can't. I only found out about this by accident about a month ago.

    captcha: pointer. the kind I just gave, or 0xFC0000008093F7AB?

  • Jack (unregistered)

    At least there was one useful option: you really want it to not show you that dialog box again! :)

    Captcha: ewww

  • Sabathius (unregistered) in reply to MX5Ringer

    Perhaps it's like a Schrödinger's cat thing. The file both exists on the system and does not exist at the same time.

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