This website is part of the community Taskforce initiative

Submission details

promote
45 +56/-11 votes
demote
change vote

Avoid UI Cramping: Start Making Dialog Boxes Resizable!

Submitted by thenonhacker on June 13, 2008 to Aesthetics, Annoyance, Usability

Today's Form Layouting technologies let programmers display user interface controls in smart layouts that flow or expand as you resize the form window.

Now is a great time to unlock the potential of these techniques and free the dialog boxes from hard-coded permanent sizes.

Great Example: Eclipse IDE Settings Screen.

Most of the sections here, in theory, might have been displayed in unresizable dialogs. But they are resizable, and controls inside flow like left or right-justified text.

Lists or Tree Boxes or fill the rest of the window when resized.

Medium

Low

Not fixed

Discussion (7 comments)

BRain wrote on June 13, 2008, 1:41pm

Already posted.

thenonhacker wrote on June 13, 2008, 3:59pm

Link please?

tgordo49 wrote on June 13, 2008, 5:19pm

Same as:
http://www.aerotaskforce.com/view/554

thenonhacker wrote on June 13, 2008, 7:42pm

Ok, but mine presents a good solution, which is to take advantage of dynamic layout engines.

brian.shapiro wrote on June 14, 2008, 1:31am

It sounds like yours is oriented towards property windows, when the other entry just says dialogs. I think property windows should function pretty close to control panel pages.. and that means they have to redo them, but they're redoing all the control panel dialogs too. (and some of the ones left as property dialogs should be control panel pages themselves)

thenonhacker wrote on June 14, 2008, 4:00pm

This applies to all Non-Resizable Windows.

OneFingerSnap wrote on August 21, 2008, 4:44pm

Amén to this!

You might also be interested in...