[GNC] Pending Edit Behavior in GnuCash

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net
Thu Jun 6 14:02:20 EDT 2019


> On Jun 6, 2019, at 12:40 PM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Adrien, 
> 
> Looking at your comments, I have two questions.
> 
> 1. Does SQLite not allow pending edits at all? or is it after every keystroke?  How do you avoid accidental deletions?

Not sure specifically what you mean by ‘pending edits'. I think writes are supposed to be instant, but I haven’t tested exactly how ‘instant’ —as by keystroke, Tab, or Enter as a commit. I don’t know that I’ve accidentally deleted something critical, certainly not an entire transaction. I might have inadvertently changed an account assignment to something I didn’t want, or selected an entire memo and deleted it when I only wanted to delete a portion of it, but that is an easy fix, especially as I’ll notice it immediately. (I wish CMD-Z ‘undo’ worked though - since it doesn’t, perhaps writes are by keystroke?) As long as the app is still open, I just make any changes I need. I’m not prevented from doing so. (I also keep the app open 24/7 and only close to do an update of GC itself, or the OS)

> 
> 2.  Regarding flashing tabs.  I do admit that I do not recall seeing anything similar lately in other applications, but I would think that if they flash as slowly as the curser does or even slower and without excessive brightness or contrast they would be OK.  Why don't you like flashing?

Personally my aversion to flashing things is from the early days of the web where people thought that just because they *could* make text flash and graphics move, that they *should*. It was ubiquitous for a spell and it drove me nuts. (such behavior is listed as a major faux pas on webpagesthatsuck.com)

But I’ve since come to be made aware that as a visual indicator it isn’t the best method. For accessibility reasons, some people don’t perceive different flashing rates the same, or even some rates at all. And some rates are potentially dangerous to use for people who can have neurological responses triggered by the flashing. Since there is no consistent flashing rate that is both ’safe’ and ‘effective’ for all, it is best not to use it.

For some reason, I’m so used to blinking cursors they don’t bother me. But that too is configurable for those that don’t like it, can’t see it well, or health reasons.

Since I usually keep GC open and wouldn’t likely trigger the flashing, I’m not going to file a bug on it should be implemented, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more pop up, or at least have some complaints on the mailing lists.

I suggested the bold/italic method based on my experience with e-mail clients that might use bold to indicate a folder with unread messages, and other apps (can’t think of specific ones at the moment) that use italics to indicate changed data that hasn’t been saved. Either or both would be good visual indicators that the user can easily spot with or without the warning dialog when exiting. I can even see the utility of an overriding text/background color but consideration here would have to take into account that users (like myself) set their own CSS files. So providing styling hooks for those alterations would be helpful in case the choice of color is the same already being used for other purposes.

Regards,
Adrien




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