surrealization.com

Please Please Please Think About Where You Put Your Menu Items

Monday, April 24 2006

I did some work in InstallShield today and went to check in my merge module to source control. I've never been a multi-keystroke shortcut kinda guy (ALT+P L I for instance) so when I have many menus to navigate through I usually use the mouse, albeit rather quickly. Sometimes when I'm not careful, I'll go a tiny bit too far and hit the next menu item. Usually this is not a big deal, but when you put Check In and Undo Check Out right next to each other it most certainly is a big deal.

This wouldn't be too bad if InstallShield actually gave you a warning before undoing your checkout. Visual Studio.NET gives you a warning. Vault has a warning option (that isn't enabled by default and doesn't affect InstallShield, it's for their UI only), though you'd think that the app hosting the SCCI interface would make sure to warn the user that they're about to lose work.

At least it was a small-ish merge module.