Universal GUI

[Dan Shafer]

On Monday, July 28, 2003, at 11:43 AM, Chipp Walters asked:

> Dan, can you give an example where "progressive discovery" works well?
>
Not off the top of my head with current apps I'm using (probably 
because it's become so automagic that I don't think about it any more) 
but Claris SmartForms Designer, for example, had a single dialog that 
was useful in a number of circumstances. When the dialog opened, it did 
so understanding the context in which it was invoked so that only the 
controls I needed in that context were visible. But I could change the 
purpose (re-focus the dialog) by selecting another item from a popup 
menu. IN that case, a new minimal set of controls would appear. I'd 
make a choice from a radio button set and the center of the dialog 
would transform (or fill if it was empty) with the set of options 
peculiar to that choice. So I only had one dialog box, ever, for this 
relatively large set of issues.

That seemed to me to be very efficient.