Family Historian User Group

The property dialog window can have two modes, pinned and unpinned. However it's method of operation is frustrating as FH 'forgets' the setting every time you open it forcing the user to remember that the mode is always unpinned and not the mode they requested the last time they used the window, or even the mode they might commonly use. This is just bad UI design and lazy coding as the size of the property dialog is remembered, but not the mode. [confused]

As an aside, I don't know about other users, but pinned is not the phrase I would use. Nearly every other program that I've come across that uses the term pinned uses it to indicate that the correspending window is pinned to the screen (visible all the time) and not linked to follow another window.

I can't really grasp the concept of pinning to a moving object. The moving object being the current record which can change. Pinning to me implies sticking in one place. A better term would be linked, and the icon to show this action would then be a chain as in 'chain links'.

ID:2644

And of course it should remember where (and if it were resizable) how big it is... In general these days we expect well behaved programs to put everything back (not just the dialogues) where and how you left it.

And I agree... I find the pinning idea very confusing here. I would prefer the property dialogue to always show the selected record. If you change it, the selection changes in the records window and/or diagram as well. If you have all 3 open, how do you know which one the Edit menu (for example) refers to?

Good point, I hadn't thought of the reverse situation. The property window will follow the record window. But the record window (or diagram window) won't follow the property window. In fact FH turns off the 'pin' mode which is definately a bad thing as the user is not in control and unlikely to be aware that the pin mode was changed*. In fact I made a note about this 'bug' when I first started using FH, though I found out in time what controlled it before I sent off a bug report to Simon.

What should happen in a well behaved program which provides a consistent UI to the user is that the [strike]pin[/strike] link mode should be bi-directional and should be totally under user control.

* Don't anyone say that it's obvious that the mode has changed because the pin icon changes. To say so means you don't understand how the eye works nor have any concept about good let alone basic UI design practises. To see such a small part of the window change ever so slightly is very hard when you're not concentrating directly on that spot. The eye's central point of vision, the fovea, is very small and if you're not looking directly at the pin icon and aren't aware that it'll change you won't see it change. This is less a problem on a 800x600 display than a 1600x1200 display, but it can still be missed and is still bad practise.