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There's a lazy solution: do what Gmail does. Rather than have an actual undo stack, especially for those pesky things like removing information from the databas
by Jach 16y ago
There's a lazy solution: do what Gmail does. Rather than have an actual undo stack, especially for those pesky things like removing information from the database, just delay action for 5-30 seconds and offer an undo button until the time expires.
- d0mine 16y agoIt is not a real undo it is a warning with timeout.
- phillco 16y ago"LAUNCHING MISSILES (click here very quickly to undo)..."
- d0mine 16y ago"cancel" and "undo" is not the same thing. You can cancel the launch. But you can't undo it. It is thermodynamically impossible.
- phillco 16y agoRight. But that's how Gmail is marketing it. "Undo send" gives you the impression that Gmail is reaching through the tubes and yanking your message back for you, but in reality it's just cancelling a launch that didn't happen yet.
- jpitz 16y agoYes, but there's a compensating transaction you can apply to the missile up until the time it reaches the target.
- blahedo 16y agoYou're right that it's not a "real" undo, but it is better than a warning with timeout; on a warning, it demands that you click (habitual action) after which there's no going back, but with this system it demands nothing, the message stays up, and you click (non-habitual action) only when you want to cancel.
- encoderer 16y agoThat also gets complicated -- if they have your app open in two tabs, they expect state to be consistent.
- piaskal 16y agoI just checked that. They only let you undo when you delete messages from Inbox, which is trivial because those messages are not deleted but moved to Trash. When I clicked on "Empty Trash now" all I got was this message: "All messages in the Trash have been deleted forever."