Re: New toplevel behaviour

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hi Ben,

On Fri, 2003-02-07 at 21:44, Ben FrantzDale wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 17:33, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 	There are some mildly controversial changes in the panel
> > behaviour with the new toplevel widget.
> > 
> > 	1) Autohiding hides into the corner of the screen. This change
> > 	   was recommended by the usability team based on the fact the
> > 	   unhiding the panel isn't any harder - you just throw the
> > 	   mouse into the corner of the screen - but it makes
> > 	   operations near the edge of the screen a lot less error
> > 	   prone - previously you had to be careful not to go near the
> > 	   hidden panel.
> 
> I think this might piss a lot of people off. While the Fitt's law thing
> is true about getting the panel to pop up, it is not true when it comes
> to actually getting to the button you are looking for. If someone had a
> tasklist on the middle of a hidden panel, a likely scenario, nearly
> twice as much mouse motion would be involved to get there if you had to
> go to a bottom corner first.

	That is a good point.

> Maybe there are a lot of users of hidden panels on this list, but I
> would want to see some concensious on this among a broader user base
> than this list before seeing that functionality chang so drasticly.

	Its not such a big deal really. I'm expecting that once this goes into
HEAD and people start using it a bit we'll get *lots* of comments. We
can take a step back then and re-assess the change. Its not hard to go
back to the old behaviour.

>  
> > 	6) You can rotate a floating panel with the mouse by holding
> > 	   down Ctrl when moving it with the mouse.
> 
> It would be interesting if some clever, intuative use of mouse movements
> could cause it to flip it's orientation. Essentially moving the mouse
> circularly about the center of the panel. That might be an overly-clever
> idea, though.

	I don't really see how that could work as the panel will move as soon
as you begin to make such a move so the center of the panel would be
moving ...

> > 	7) You can resize the panel by clicking on the edge and
> > 	   dragging. Note, that you can change the width (height for
> > 	   vertical panels) of floating panels. The idea is that
> > 	   floating panels are "packed". I think this is a sensible
> > 	   concept.
> 
> This is how Windows does it. It's definately streightforward, but it
> also has the drawback of putting a large active area (what ammounts to a
> resize handle) on the panel for something that is done very rarely.

	Actually, I doesn't work that way currently. Nor does it work very well
currently - I'm going to have to re-think it a little.

Good Luck,
Mark.