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Many modern webapps have adopted the pattern of only showing action buttons when the field in question has focus. I think it is an approach that is worth considering for Sapphire. When a user is faced with a large form with many fields, there could be quite a few action buttons. These buttons contribute quite a bit of visual noise to a form. Not showing them until the focus is on the field in question would reduce the level of noise. The downside is that some actions would take two clicks instead of one... adding new entry to a list... picking a value from a browse dialog. We need to understand which way the tradeoff scale tips in this case.
From Troy: ---------- Yeah, that is a cool feature. It has some nice charateristics for object-based editors where it's natural to select things because direct manipulation is a dominant part of the interaction. (Though for some reason I really dislike it in Word when their toolbar comes up over an image.) It seems a little less straighforward to adapt this to forms - though could be an interesting area to explore. Also, as alluded to in the last line of your initial comment - it's also probably the kind of thing where you'd want to bounce early ideas of people to get feedback, even informally, because it's less clear in this case that we'd actually making things better - it could end up just being somewhat bothersome realtive to existing form conventions.
