Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Re: [Ethereal-cvs] cvs commit: ethereal/gtk menu.c

["Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

OK, fine, it's back under Edit.

Ulf Lamping said:
> The GNOME HIG suggest the instant apply pardigma, as this is *much*
> easier to understand, than the current "Ok/Apply/Save/Cancel" buttons in
>  many of our todays dialogs.

More precisely, what they say is:

    Do not make the user press an OK or Apply button to make the changes
happen, unless either:

        o the change will take more than about one second to apply, in
which case applying the change immediately could make the system
feel slow or unresponsive, or

        o the changes in the window have to be applied simultaneously to
prevent the system entering a potentially unstable state. For
example, the hostname and proxy fields in a network properties
window.

At least when it comes to the protocol preferences (and, currently, the
coloring), the first of those applies to files above a certain size.

As for the Save button, there's a fatal problem with not having a Save
button for protocol preferences:

    not all changes somebody makes to protocol preferences are changes
that they want to be the default for all subsequent captures.

There are some settings that a user might well want to change from capture
to capture - and if they change it for one particular capture, they
*still* might not want those to become the default automatically.

So, for some of the settings, instant apply probably makes sense.  Instant
apply, and automatic saving, do *N*O*T* make sense for protocol
preferences!