I'm happy to see that I am not the only one who finds the dialog
confusing.
And it doesn't help that "edit conflict" then uses the terms "mine"
and "theirs".
Some quick comments from my side:
> "should the user interface only make sense to people who have read the help file?" Yes.
Not at all. A help file should be supplemental only. In the case of
merging, a rather complex task, even for developers and apparently
hard to get right, the availability of a decent documentation is
important. And you should certainly read a bit of it before merging.
Still, even if you understand the concept thanks to the help file,
next time you merge you may have forgotten which button performs which
action, which is all too easy with the given labels. Merging is hard
enough already, don't make it any harder by replacing intuitive dialog
design with a comprehensive help file.
When I first encountered the dialog, I didn't know which button would
do what I wanted to do. And worse, the dialog didn't give me any clues
to figure it out, especially since "edit conflict" uses other terms.
Yes, there is a nice "Help" button, but that is easily being
overlooked as most applications which such buttons do not provide any
useful help content *at all*. Same as you can be banner blind, I
consider myself "help button blind". Even knowing that the help file
contains the information I am interested in, I'd prefer not to open
the help file each time and have some clues directly in the dialog.
To make the discussion a bit more constructive, I'd imagine a dialog
layout like this, that would help me quite a bit: http://i56.tinypic.com/e7nj9s.png
Additionally, the paths right of the buttons could be a link to the
log of that file, since it may help to understand the reason for the
conflict or changes to the file (or even who made changes). What do
you think?
------------------------------------------------------
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4061&dsMessageId=2857895
To unsubscribe from this discussion, e-mail: [users-unsubscribe_at_tortoisesvn.tigris.org].
Received on 2011-10-18 01:40:09 CEST
