Re: WM standards

[Carlos Pereira <carlos pehoe civil ist utl pt>]

> Heh... somebody needs to design a better mouse UI for your app-- I
> worked on engineering visualization software once that used all three
> buttons for scaling/rotation in full-screen mode too, but we still
> managed to work it so that pop-up menus were available on a
> right-click... plus of course anyone who's using such an app seriously
> ought to be using a Spaceball or something anyway :)

I do have pop up menus (for example to select on the fly
objects that don't have a visual representation and therefore
cannot be selected by clicking on them, as lights and layers) 
and I plan to have wired windows with moving ants (to select
many objects at once, etc...), etc. but these need always 
to be triggered by some previous information. If you are 
just manipulating objects with the mouse you really don't want 
pop up menus coming up all the time, do you? And there is no 
vacant button either: I have x,y,z (trackball) rotations on 
the left, x,y movements on the middle and up,down scaling 
on the right (the trackball code was developped by SGI
years ago and works very well with mouses, actually).

Moreover, I don't want to slow down the expert with 
something that is usefull only for the first time newbie. 
This is a cheap, very serious, mistake, I believe.

One solution would be a tooltip poping
up when the user stops moving the mouse for more than
a given time (as Enlightenment does, for example),
explaining out to leave, on the condition
that serious users can disable these annoying
messages, both from a control panel and from config files.
(if you are in a conference, showing some protein
stuff, the last thing you need are automatic
pop up messages in your laptop screen...)

Another solution would be a double click on the screen,
but this has very serious disadvantages too...
and Shift+Mouse clicks are just to cryptic
as well...

> Anyway, whatever the final decision on shortcuts, I think apps should
> generally support more than one way of getting into/out of full screen
> mode-- *only* being able to do something with a keyboard shortcut isn't
> any more usable than *only* being able to do it with the mouse.

You might be right, at least about the concept,
but I am not sure about the best implementation of it,

For the time being, Escape to go up,
Escape to go down, is simple and works.

Carlos