Re: Gary's Recollections of Delta

[Ralph Gonzalez <rgonzale@ibl.bm>]

Rich Thomson wrote:

> Well, wizards have their place.  But like anything else, they can be
> overused or used in places where they aren't needed.  Wizards are just
> a graphical state machine interface.  Sometimes there isn't a
> sequentiality needed and the same problem could be solved with a
> dialog box containing all the necessary tunable controls (set to
> appropriate defaults) with OK and Cancel buttons.  Other times, there
> are things you have to do at step 3 that you can't do until the user
> has entered some data at step 2.

 OK, but most wizards I've seen are much stupider than
that. For example, when you use Netscape Communicator's
User Profile Manager utility, it pops up a window to ask
your name, then another window to ask your profile name,
then another window to ask for server names, etc. Each
query has a lot of text describing it. I guess that's the best
way for newbies, but it would be nice to have an option for
a quick configuration screen where you just fill in all the stuff at
once.
--
Ralph Gonzalez
rgonzale@ibl.bm