On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Eben Eliason <eben.elia...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 3:02 AM, Albert Cahalan <acaha...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> That said, at least for the common case of the scrollbar being at >> the edge of the screen and possibly elsewhere, there is a solution. >> Scrollbars could widen up as the mouse goes over them, overlapping >> into/above the area that is to be scrolled. >> >> It's a nice solution, allowing for scrollbars 100 pixels wide. > > This is an interesting thought, but it seems to me that it's actually > a solution proposed for the wrong circumstance. The scrollbars that > lie at the edge of the screen are the ones that needn't be large, > since grabbing them (assuming they are properly edge-aligned) is easy > regardless of their width. I suspect the "infinite width" concept fails on real-world hardware, particularly with a kid and a filthy touchpad. I expect that the mouse pointer won't reliably remain at the edge of the screen. Think of the mouse pointer as bouncing off of the screen edge. (because it may move a bit in some random direction) > It's those that float within the UI, such as a scrolling left column > (eg. Pippy examples) that are hardest to target, and which need > adequate affordances to make them usable. Increasing the target area > dynamically on hover is definitely a solution worth experimenting > with. > >> Speed is critical of course. Being slow like the Frame would be >> some kind of torture. My best guess for appropriate timing: > > I'm not even sure an animation would be critical to understanding this > model. One possibility might be to only increase the size of the > scroll handle (leaving the "bar" itself thin), when the cursor is > within range of it. It could grow from its center, so that it hovers > above yet centered on the bar it belongs to, perhaps settling on a > width 3x that of the bar. Leaving the bar thin should help performance, so I like that. Animation isn't for understanding. It's for eye tracking. BTW, rounded corners and 3D shading are important for the same reason. Does 3x get to about 100x100 ? That's the size needed. Expressing that in less device-specific units, 10% of screen height or 7.5% of screen width (whichever is greater) would be appropriate for a normal mouse. Give it a bit more for touchpads, and stick to 2-pixel alignment in case that renders faster. An XO with a nice mouse would thus get 90x90. Maybe the new touchpad should get 112x112, and the original touchpad should get 160x160. (yes that's 0.8 inches per edge) A thought occurs to me regarding the grab keys. By default, they could be made sticky (like CapsLock) and cause an on-screen indicator to appear. Probably this would be a large 2-direction or 4-direction arrow (a shaped undecorated window) about 1/2 the height of the screen in the long dimension. Use the touchpad, arrow keys, or game keys to scroll. Hit a grab key or any non-scrolling button to leave this mode. Optionally, but off by default, go into this mode when the user clicks (especially a fast click w/o drag) on the scrollbar slider. _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel