I don't believe Word's sentence display is editable either. They do have a
non-modal dialog, which lets you click back on the document, edit, and
then click resume on the dialog.
I've seen spell checkers with the editable "change to" field before.
Selecting something from the list changes what is in the entry field, but
the user can make their own modifications to the replacement word. I use
it every once and a while, when I have an odd mistyping which the word
suggestor didn't have any luck with.
Personally, I prefer my implementation to Word's. I think it would be more
confusing to switch from the dialog to the document to edit a word, and
then go back to the dialog, rather than just typing your word in the
providided entry field. However, I'm willing to consider other
implementations (I can always have my local modifications for personal use
anyway).
> 2. How committed are you to your reordering of the buttons? GUI designers
> get pretty finicky about issues like this because of how they affect the
> user experience, so I want to make sure I understand the rationale behind
> your design.
That's fine. In fact, I had noticed the Ignores on top, Changes on the
bottom design in Word, but then forgot about it when placing the buttons.
I can switch these around very easily.
> 3. Likewise, in places where your button labelling diverges from W97's, are
> the differences meaningful?
Labelling? Do you mean the exact wording on the dialog?
That's really not important to me. If you prefer it uses slightly
different phrases/words/etc, that's fine.
> 4. Also, it looks like you intend to allow people to swap existing custom
> dictionaries right on this dialog.
> Have you put that functionality here to avoid needing the extra dialog, or
> because you believe that swapping dictionaries is a common enough activity
> that people shouldn't have to do those extra clicks?
It wasn't from a desire to avoid a second dialog, as I expect we'll need
that dialog anyway, to allow the user to select which dictionaries to
actually search, and eventually, allow the user to tweak the behavior of
the underlying spell checking code (ignore captials, ignore words with
numbers, etc).
My intention with the drop-down list was that all of the user's selected
personal dictionaries would be shown there, and they could 1) easily add a
word to a specific dictionary and 2) create a new dictionary (by typing in
a new name, rather than selecting from the list).
The reason: I would use it. I use Abiword for several separate but
highly technical fields (such as computers, biochemistry, biophysics, etc)
and I like to keep terminology from each separate. It would annoy me to
have to open the dialog to set the default "add to" dictionary all the
time. However, I guess most people are only going to use one personal
dictionary, so it's rather pointless.
I have yet to put any code behind that yet, so removing it is not a big
deal.
> PS: Please don't get discouraged by this nit-picky feedback. The work
> you've already put into getting this dialog up and running is impressive,
> and I really appreciate what you've done.
I'm not discouraged. I know the dialog I checked in is far from perfect.
> This sort of fine-tuning to make sure that dialogs work as smoothly as
> possible for our target user -- the oft-cited church secretary -- isn't very
> interesting on the coding level, but all these subtle details really add up.
> When we're done, the cumulative effect can make a huge difference in the
> day-to-day usability of the product.
I agree, and I have no problems with changing the dialog to help improve
usability.
Justin