RLH I saw this when reading up in a Vista blog. It is a "task" dialog that presents choices to the user in a more intuitive and verbose way:
http://shellrevealed.com/photos/blog_images/images/659/original.aspx
I thought it was a neat idea and so I put it here to share and to remind myself about it.
schlenk Looks nice, something like it would be a good thing for tklib.
Bryan Oakley That is arguable. User interfaces should have what are termed "affordances". That is, if there's something you can click, it should look like something you should click. Those things don't look like buttons (unless all Vista buttons look that way). Still, it's better than some alternatives I've seen.
RLH True, they don't look like buttons. I was more liking the "idea" of the way it presents stuff to the user in a clear manner. I think they "act" like big buttons. Probably a better paradigm could be thought of but I was looking at the presentation of the information more than the function.
RS Do they get button appearance on mouse over? This is a trend I witness even in this IE 5.00, and more so on more recent Win XP. At least one can easily check affordance with that...
RLH My guess is 'yes'.
peterc Vista seems to be the next step in the convergence of the appearance of web interfaces and those of more traditional apps. They're not buttons but users know about clickable regions acting as buttons from their experiences on web pages.
I have mixed feelings about this sort of dialog. On the one hand, it presents a good amount of information (including a recommendation). On the other, most users tend not to read dialogs with more than a few words. Arguably, simple, consise and well worded dialogs tend to be better. eg:
tk_messageBox -title "Save document?" -message "Save your work?" -type yesno
That might just be a matter of taste though.
GWM You can already make verbose buttons of course.
pack [button .b1 -text "Do you want\nto save your work" -command "puts {Saved it}"]
pack [button .b2 -text "Or would you like\nto discard your work" -command "puts {You lost it}"]- it's up to you to add colours, rollover effects etc.