Windows Vista's new Task Dialog finally allows the use of verbs on action buttons.
Jeff Waugh will be pleased. (He doesn't put his slides online, but everyone in the universe has seen the talk I'm referring to by now, right? :-)
Posted by gerv at September 11, 2006 6:01 PMNo, I haven't see it. I think I'm even in the same universe as you, though some people would disagree. :) Care to explain for the guy who is wondering what you're talking about?
Posted by: Jonathan Rascher at September 12, 2006 3:09 AMOh, and I agree 100% on the coolness of this. There are too many dialogs out there that say something like "do something really dangerous, or abort if you aren't sure" and then leave you with a choice of OK or cancel.
Posted by: Jonathan Rascher at September 12, 2006 3:13 AMIf Raymond Chen is to believed, Task Dialogs aren't anything new but just plain old dialog boxes (available since at least Win95) which are now being used instead of the so far more common message boxes (see http://tinyurl.com/l6ybx ).
This is thus rather a policy change on the part of Microsoft than any additional shortcut for programmers which will have to lay out each Task Dialog themselves (I haven't seen any API for simplifying that task yet) - and as a consequence message boxes will continue to exist or even prevail simply because they can be invoked with a single line of code...
Posted by: Simon at September 12, 2006 7:57 AMYeah, nice.
But, there still is that darn dialog close button (x) in the upper right corner...
Looks like there will indeed be some new API (see http://tinyurl.com/nqcfr ), but it's simply not documented yet - even though Vista RC1 is already available. Never mind.
Posted by: Simon at September 12, 2006 8:50 AMJonathan: Jeff has this bit in his talk on usability where he takes the mickey out of Windows for having lots of dialogs with just "OK" and "Cancel".
Posted by: Gerv at September 12, 2006 8:36 PM