"Simon Buchan" <simon@hand-multimedia.co.nz> wrote [cut]
More seriously, UI consistancy with the local platform is rather important. On X systems, every time you double-click the title it collapses into it, while on Windows it maximises! The GUI should by default behave the same as the rest of the user's programs. Think of it as localising to the users UI locale.
Thats a good point, but is that not convention only? Its not required behaviour. Suppose I am on an XWindows system and I want MSWindows behaviour. That point about locale is a good one. A sequence of user actions must map to a state-machine that finally maps the sequence of clicks into a particular function such as Maximise, Minimise, etc. Maybe its possible to load the map from some sort of resource. "Windows Actions file" States: Maximised, Minimised, UserSize; Actions: TitleDoubleclick Maximised -> UserSize Minimised -> UserSize UserSize -> Maximised "XWindows Actions File" States: Maximised, Minimised, UserSize; Actions: TitleDoubleclick Maximised -> UserSize Minimised -> UserSize UserSize -> Minimised maybe XML would be a good way to store resources. regards Andy Little