Re: Your opinions again,

[mpriestley -at- VNET -dot- IBM -dot- COM]

Marilynne Smith suggests that "appears" may be too dramatic a word for
something as ordinary as a screen change:

>To most of us, a change in the appearance of
>the monitor is just another page turned on the computer.  Why not just say
>something like "on the next screen choose XYZ"?  What the user cares about
>is what they're going to do on the next screen.  They don't need trumpets to
>announce the change.

We probably have different operating systems in mind.  In a windowing system
(such as Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, or X Windows), the page-turning analogy
is inappropriate.  The window that appears might only be a quarter of the
screen, overlaying previous elements when it appears.  It is not "the
next screen" so much as it is a new element added to the current screen.
Most often, the user will be doing something with the new window, but this
is not necessarily the case: it could be a monitor window, or an announcement
window ("The copyright window appears.  Wait a few seconds, and it will close
automatically once the application finishes loading.").  Interaction with
a windowing system can be very non-linear: the "next" window is likely to
be very dependent on a user choice, rather than the next step in a logical
sequence.  As such, I think it makes sense to draw attention to the new window,
naming it and (if necessary) briefly describing it.

I hope this clarifies,

Michael Priestley
mpriestley -at- vnet -dot- ibm -dot- com
Disclaimer: presently incapacitated by ankylo - anlykly - uh - dyslexia.
I didn't type this in at all, a poltergheist did, so it's responsible not
me (and not my employer neither).