For those that don’t know a modal dialog is an attention whore dialog that hijacks, and kidnaps a program’s UI until it is satisfied.
What this means is if you’re interacting with a modal window, but need data for that window from one of the program’s other windows. Well too fucking bad, you’re using this modal window, because fuck you, that’s why. It won’t let you look at the other window. It will make a noise and flash cruel and mockingly at you, fueling your rage even more.
It obviously isn’t because of a race condition, since idiots (who must use a voice activation system to program use them, because they’re too dumb to be literate) use them in situations where no possible race condition could occur unless the program was written through a process using an angry chimp flinging dung at a giant key board.
So instead you have to cancel out of the Nazi, Fascist, and Soviet dialog (it’s a known fact modal dialogs were designed by Hitler, and Stalin, and enthusiastically endorsed by Mussolini), and lose any information you entered. Again, because fuck you, that’s why.
Idiots.
If you’re programmer who does this shit, I’m really sorry for your mom who will be burning in the 9th ring of hell due to the pact and fornication with the devil she made to produce you.
They ARE traitors!
Traitors against nonmodal dialog boxes.
A pox upon their houses!
No, seriously, (in C++) after a CDialog is instantiated it is much easier to call CDialog:: DoModal than it is to call CDialog::Create. Lazy programmers choose modal dialogs as default.
There ARE some times when a modal dialog is essential, especially if the operation is to initiate an action, but usually there is no purpose for it other than to irritate the user.
Thing is, modal dialogs have been a standard for a long time. The only programs I know that don’t use them are those like the GIMP or Inkscape which use a different framework in order to make compatibility easier on multiple operating systems.
Also, have you run into this annoying thing, where you open one dialog, and use it to open another, and then you can’t move the second one out of the way to see the main window? That alone is enough for me to hate application modals.
I don’t have much experience with c++ personally, but usually when an action is difficult, but usually done the same way, I write a function, or possible a class involved with that action that takes care of the repetitive work, and takes arguments for the things that are usually different. Then just reuse the code in various projects when relevant.
So instead of:
//do this to free up time to go slap the sun burns of war orphans
CDialog.DoModal("blah blah","fuck you, that's why")
//call this function to make my dialog, freeing up time to work on world peace
maDialog("blah blah","the cure for cancer is...")
Also I’ve found thinking of the program not a single linear process, but various processes independently that happen in a loop as events are checked tends to make code that handles modeless dialogs well without too much fuss.
BigT, exactly! Bastards.
casdave, indeed, Rupert Barnard has been notified.
While we’re hating on poor programming choices, I hate with the fury of a thousand suns anything that steals focus from what I’m doing. 99% of the time my work computer steals focus from me, it’s for something totally inconsequential.
“Hey dude, I know you were typing away there for a bit, but I really wanted to show you this dialogue box.”
Often something like one of Adobe’s awful products wanting to auto-update for the googolth time today, or the Java runtime wanting to download some menial, useless patch.
There used to be a utility called TweakUI on Windows XP that had an option to “prevent applications from stealing focus”. I don’t know what became of it in later iterations of Windows. I believe Compiz has a similar setting in Linux - in fact I recall it even has a setting so you can configure how aggressively it prevents applications from stealing focus. It’s always amusing when I message someone and get something back like “:wq” because they thought they were talking to vi but their IM client decided to get in their face.
Or even better, one of these nagwares that wants to autoupdate – and you then click on autoupdate and it takes you to a download page! Yeah, tell me every single time I boot up that updates are available and you can’t have the decency to update yourself when I tell you you can?