Exit warning

nico_h · Post by **nico_h** » Wed May 12, 2004 11:40 am

We have a discussion about the lack of an exit warning over at elysiun.
http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24677

I request the implementation of an optional exit warning.

nico_h · Post by **nico_h** » Fri May 14, 2004 12:09 am

What do I have to do to get a response to this? I have seen this question before, and at elysiun, it seems a user-only discussion. Will we get an exit warning in Blender?

Monkeyboi · Post by **Monkeyboi** » Fri May 14, 2004 12:34 am

hopefully we will..

theeth · Post by **theeth** » Fri May 14, 2004 1:38 am

By warning, do you mean:

1) A confirmation menu (when pressing Q) (already exist)

1.1) Same thing but with a two choice menu that defaults (if wanted) to NO

2) #1 but applied to the X button (or whatever is used to close a window on your OS)

2.1) #1.1 but applied to the X button

----------------------------------------------

1 and 1.1 would be really easy to do (minus the user config part)

Broken talked about 2 and 2.1 in the elysiun's thread and I quote:

broken wrote: I experimented with adding in such a thing in tuhopuu1 a while back, but (apart from not detecting if it had been saved or anything like that) it was clunky - either the menu appeared right under the mouse pointer, which was half off the screen in the corner of the window, or the mouse pointer had to be warped back to the center of the blender window, which was quite disconcerting. If anyone has a real solution for this, feel free to post your ideas in that thread on blender.org

Martin

Martin

SamAdam · Post by **SamAdam** » Fri May 14, 2004 2:47 am

i want 2.1, and gosh darn it, why didn't I get any good feedback on my thread a little bit ago? Just my luck. It probably wouldn't take that long to write. or I guess I could just learn to save my work more, okay, you win, I will just save more.

matt_e · Post by **matt_e** » Fri May 14, 2004 8:15 am

It's easy to say (and I'd surely agree) "we should have an exit warning", but the question remains: How? That's what I was asking in that thread on elysiun.com, having tried two different possibilities, none of which worked very well. For all the flaming and begging and whatever in that thread, everybody seems to be avoiding this issue.

nico_h · Post by **nico_h** » Fri May 14, 2004 8:30 am

What I would like is something like 'Save changes?'. I had no idea that it's a technical problem, so I'm sorry to annoy the coders now, also by implying it's intentional to not implement it.

The idea that came to my mind is to open the save window when the user wants to exit Blender and unsaved changes have been detected. One could probably change the button captions then: save/exit without saving.

Wouldn't it be possible to mimic a message box by using a floating dialog like the 'background picture' thingie for this?

Monkeyboi · Post by **Monkeyboi** » Sat May 15, 2004 7:19 pm

How about it appearing in the center of the screen when pressing the X button?

ilac · Post by **ilac** » Sat May 15, 2004 8:21 pm

Having a choice like 1.1 as suggested by theeth wouldn't be a bad idea and would help those who said they press Q instead of W and quit without meaning too. But I'd rather not have an exit confirmation with the 'x' button. It's unlikely you're going to press that by mistake and being asked if you want to exit when you know you want to exit is annoying - if in doubt if you saved make it a habit to exit by pressing Q. ' X' doesn't need it imo.

Monkeyboi · Post by **Monkeyboi** » Sat May 15, 2004 8:47 pm

I think the X thing is the most annoying thing. I sometimes press the X button when not meaning to. Besides, it's untraditional that an application just closes without a warning when pressing the X button.

Ofcourse, ideally, it should only appear when you haven't just saved (as in other programs), but I'm told it's not possible to do.

ilac · Post by **ilac** » Sat May 15, 2004 9:08 pm

Apart from the fact that I cannot see how you press the X without meaning too, tradition is not, imo, a valid reason for anything except cultural preservation. Not meaning to sound rude or anything!

halibut · Post by **halibut** » Sun May 16, 2004 1:52 am

A new user or one who is used to using MS Office for example, may click the X when they want to save, I do this in MS applications all the time, when I want to quit and save, I don't click File > Save and then click on the X, I just click the X, and then click on Save.

Also, if I leave this computer with blender open and somebody wants to use it, they will assume (as i'm sure most windows users would) that they can close anything without causing any losses, as long as no dialogue boxes pop up!

I am definatly for having a "Save and exit", "discard changes", "cancel" dialogue box appear when clicking on the X, but then, I am not a code =(

fligh · Post by **fligh** » Sun May 16, 2004 6:01 am

Personally I don't mind which way the decision goes. At the moment most people seem to want a message when the windoze X is clicked. But what about "File -> New" and "Reopen Last (or Ctrl-O)"? Because they both default to the last saved version. With Q that's four different ways you could lose unsaved work.

%<

matt_e · Post by **matt_e** » Sun May 16, 2004 7:00 am

nico_h wrote:Wouldn't it be possible to mimic a message box by using a floating dialog like the 'background picture' thingie for this?

Problems with that are due to Blender's 'window space' system - i.e. Which type of window does the floating dialog appear in? If you have more than one window space split open, where does it go? As far as I know, the way Blender works right now, it's impossible to have anything other than a popup menu overlapping the window space border, so a floating panel would have to be in one window space or the other. Which brings the problem, if the floating dialog appears off to the side in one of your windows, will a user notice it?

I'm also not sure if it's possible to block the (X) close button like that either - In most other programs that have these "save changes?" warnings, they bring up a modal OS-native dialog box that blocks the (X) close button and blocks all other activity within the application. To my knowledge, I don't know if this is possible in Blender and suspect it wouldn't be. So even if you could bring up a floating panel when the (X) is clicked, it'd be just like opening up another panel of tools, like the Background Image one and be floating there with all the other UI controls, all accessible.

Monkeyboi wrote:How about it appearing in the center of the screen when pressing the X button?

That's what I tried before in tuhopuu1, but since Blender's popup menus appear under the mouse pointer and disappear when you move the mouse away, the only way to get the menu in the centre of the screen is to artificially warp the mouse pointer to the centre of the screen, then bring the menu up underneath it. This was not a good solution - it was very disconcerting to click the (X) up in the corner of the screen, and suddenly have the mouse pointer disappear from where it was and reappear somewhere else (and that's if you even noticed that it had moved and not just vanished).

Ofcourse, ideally, it should only appear when you haven't just saved (as in other programs), but I'm told it's not possible to do.

Oh it may be possible to check if there have been changes or not - I think the actual interface to it is a much greater problem to solve though.

fligh wrote: But what about "File -> New" and "Reopen Last (or Ctrl-O)"? Because they both default to the last saved version. With Q that's four different ways you could lose unsaved work.

Good point - and at least these would be a good start since there are already confirmation popups you can add the extra menu items for saving to.

Monkeyboi · Post by **Monkeyboi** » Sun May 16, 2004 10:49 am

Personally I had imagined something like this:

Edit: I think I need to spell things out a bit more..
In the mockup the idea is that it overlaps any window borders and puts itself in the center of the screen. It is not a traditional Blender popup in that it doesn't disappear when moving the mouse away from it, therefore the cursor needs not to be screen centered for it to work. It should appear when clicking the (X) button, going to File>Quit Blender, File>New and File>Reopen Last (with the two last options it should just say "Save changes?" since you are not quitting)

The problem is that I realise this is completely inconsistant with what we have currently in Blender - nothing looks quite like this. So, the question is, does it matter? I suppose one could argue that quitting is a special command that could justify having a special popup.
I think Wings3D works like this, ie. it has a popup type that only appears when quitting and executing the New (Ctrl-N) command.

This is what Wings 3D looks like:

So, again, the first question is, whould this be a nice way to implement it? The second one is, would this be possible at all?

-William