Modal vs Modeless

[Christian Jansen]

Hello,

I've observed the following two used cases in the last couple of weeks
very often.

User A wants to setup an event. She opens the event dialog. Then she
tries to navigate, in the calendar view, to check something.

User B prepares a meeting. He sends out an agenda by email. Then, he
opens the event dialog, adds the location and the attendees to the
meeting. As a last step he want to copy the agenda fro the email to the
description field of the event dialog.

In both cases the users have to do extra steps (closing and reopening of
the dialog) to fulfill their tasks.

Given that, I'm asking me if there is a reason for not switching to a
modeless event dialog.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Christian

[Dan Mosedale]

Christian Jansen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've observed the following two used cases in the last couple of weeks
> very often.
>

> [...]

>
> In both cases the users have to do extra steps (closing and reopening of
> the dialog) to fulfill their tasks.
>
> Given that, I'm asking me if there is a reason for not switching to a
> modeless event dialog.

I would support that; I find dialogs that are unnecessarily modal to
have the exact sorts of problems you describe. There are some gotchas
that we'll need to keep an eye out for, in particular defining the
behavior for cases where somebody has a dialog open for an event, and
then drags the event inside the view...

Dan

[Michael Büttner]

Dan Mosedale wrote:
> I would support that; I find dialogs that are unnecessarily modal to
> have the exact sorts of problems you describe. There are some gotchas
> that we'll need to keep an eye out for, in particular defining the
> behavior for cases where somebody has a dialog open for an event, and
> then drags the event inside the view...

that's exactly the implication of making the dialog modeless, but it
shouldn't be that hard to sync the views with the dialog. the views can
change some basic properties of an event, like start- and end-time,
which is easily synchronized with the dialog.

+1 for this feature.

mickey.

[Joey Minta]

Dan Mosedale wrote:
> There are some gotchas
> that we'll need to keep an eye out for, in particular defining the
> behavior for cases where somebody has a dialog open for an event, and
> then drags the event inside the view...

Perhaps even more difficult, if someone deletes an event from the view.

Other potential pitfalls:
-Multiple edit windows for the same event
-Edit windows for parent and occurrence at the same time

-Joey