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Find Windows

A Find window is a modeless dialog that opens in response to the Find command to provide an interface for specifying items to search for. Its appearance can vary depending on the needs of your application, but if your application handles text you might want to make your Find window similar to the one shown in Figure 14-53 to provide a consistent user experience.

Figure 14-53 A Find window

Find windows are useful in document-creation applications, because users can use one Find window to search for a term in several different documents. If your application is not document-based or if it is a single-window application, however, you might instead choose to offer find or searching functionality in a scope bar. A scope bar is attached to a window and provides both search and filtering capabilities to users. Figure 14-19 (page 201) shows a scope bar in Safari. For more information about scope bars and how to use them in your application, see “Scope Bars” (page 201).

Preferences Windows

A preferences window is a modeless dialog that contains settings the user changes infrequently. In general, the user opens a preferences window to change the default way an application displays an item or performs a task, closes the window, and expects the new settings to have taken effect. For some guidance on how to provide preferences in your application, see “Preferences” (page 75).

Often, an application needs to provide a set of preferences for each of several different categories of functionality. For example, Safari allows the user to set preferences for bookmarks, webpage appearance, RSS display, and security measures, among other things. Because these categories are unrelated to each other, it would be confusing to display settings for all of them in one pane. Therefore, Safari (and many other applications) provides a preferences window with a toolbar that contains a toolbar item for each category. When the user clicks a toolbar item, the window displays a pane that contains the settings associated with that item. Figure 14-54 shows the General pane of Safari preferences.

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Figure 14-54 An example of a preferences window

If you choose to create a preferences window that uses a toolbar to switch among different categories of settings, make sure the toolbar is not customizable. This is because a toolbar in a preferences window does not provide a shortcut to frequently used commands, but acts as a convenient way to group settings. In addition, you should remove the show/hide toolbar control in your preferences window toolbar (you can see this control in Figure 14-4 (page 191)). This is because there is no need to hide the toolbar in a preferences window (hiding it would also hide all but the currently selected collection of settings), and because novice users might mistakenly click the toolbar control when they mean to click the close button.

A preferences window should not include a resize control. In general, preferences windows do not need to display active minimize or zoom buttons. Remember that preferences windows are intended to provide users with a place to make adjustments to the way an application behaves, so there’s seldom a need for preferences windows to be resized or to remain open for a long time.

If you have changeable panes in your preferences window, the title of the window should be the title of the currently selected pane. For example, the title of the window shown in Figure 14-54 is “General” because the currently selected toolbar icon is labeled “General.” (If your preferences window does not contain additional panes, the title should be “Application Name Preferences”.) In addition, a changeable-pane preferences window should remember which pane the user selected the last time the window was open.

The menu item to open your preferences window should be in the application menu and be labeled Preferences. Use Command-comma for the keyboard shortcut.

Dialogs

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The Open Dialog

The Open dialog appears when the user chooses the Open command or presses Command-O. The Open dialog is application modal (that is, the user can switch to other applications before closing the Open dialog).

If you implement an Open command, you should also include an Open Recent command so users can open recently opened documents without going through the dialog. Figure 14-55 shows an example of an Open dialog.

Figure 14-55 An Open dialog

The Open dialog contains these elements:

■A default title (“Open”); you should add your application’s name to the Open dialog title—”TextEdit: Open,” for example.

■Back and forward buttons to navigate back and forth between selections made in list or column view.

■A pop-up menu that contains common places a user might save things and Recent Places (the five most recent folders the user opened or saved documents to). Your application specifies the default location, typically one of the predefined folders in the user’s home folder. If the user selects another folder, the dialog should “remember” the user’s selection the next time the dialog appears.

■A source list that mirrors the Finder sidebar.

■A column or list view for navigating the file system.

■A Cancel button and an Open (default) button.

■A resize control in the lower-right corner.

■The ability for expert users to specify a pathname by pressing Command-Shift-G. (Note that the pathname separator is the “/” character.)

240 Dialogs

2008-06-09 | © 1992, 2001-2003, 2008 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved.