I was wondering if there are some ideas "in the air" about the design of dialog/options windows of the OS and maybe its core apps.
During the years, I've seen many different philosophies:
- a lot of small nested dialog boxes that pop up, like classic Windows.
- a single window, with a main "tree" of categories on the side, and the dialog boxes embedded on the window itself, switched from one another via the tree. An example would be the old TweakUI utility, or LibreOffice's options window.
- similar to the previous, but instead of the tree, the dialog boxes are switched via tabs (sometimes nested). Old versions of MS-Office did this.
- like the previous two, but some options appear in multiple categories, adding confusion IMO. Skype had this years ago, dunno now.
- the modern Windows disaster, where windows have an incoherent salad of controls, degins and behaviors: some buttons open dialogs; some open new windows; some text behave like weblinks, and opens a new "page" inside the same window; some other text looks like weblinks, but behave like buttons; some links even allow cyclic movement through the windows; etc.
My hope is that ReactOS does not follow the modern Windows footsteps and make the Control Panel an unusable monster.
Personally, I think that the 2nd design I've listed is the most usable one.
Thank you for your attention. Comments are welcomed