| p>When designing the wizard I am trying to keep three different wizard look
and feel design in mind: The Java Look
and Feel Guidelines, Gnome
Human Interface Guidelines, and Microsoft
Windows. The good news is that they all jump out and shout Border
Layout. The particulars of the imaging and the wording deigned by the
wizard specs can be left to the user. There will be some design trade offs,
however. Gnome specifies that the cancel button should be on the left, Windows
and Java say on the right. Gnome loses this battle and (for now) will not
be supported and the buttons will be on the right.
Java on the other hand has some particular allowances for what can be
put on the left pane which segues nicely into some of the functionality that
a wizard needs, namely to skip some pages base on user values or other reasons.
For example when you select "standard" install you shouldn't get the pages
with all of the custom component selections. This will be handled by the
child <step> type of the <wizard> task, which will be able to
contain all of the same children that the wizard task contains. These would
both support "if" and "unless" attributes.
The next thing we need to handle is "next" and "back". This would be
handled by a <prompt> element that would indicate the buttons that
can be showed and their state. Then we would need <do> and <undo>
elements based on what the user selected in the prompt. These would just
be re-named sequential elements with "if" and "unless" attributes. (cancel
would unwind to the beginning and exit).
Well, I got to go meet my wife for dinner so I'll go deeper later this
weekend. |
