Re: Zoom Patch

["Sameer Sahasrabuddhe" <sameerds gmail com>]

On 9/1/08, Michael Ross <michael e ross gmail com> wrote:

> - When you roll the wheel towards yourself you are "pulling the image
> closer" and the roll up motion is "flicking the image away."

> have tried to think of rolling up as diving into the screen, but after more
> than ten years of mouse controlled zooming I have it ingrained that I am
> stationary and I am manipulating the world inside the monitor.

That's quite an interesting way to look at the zoom interaction ...
never encountered an interface that used this analogy, so seems
unfamiliar to me! But it does make sense. The mapping of "scroll up"
to "zoom in" is pretty much default in most apps ... try it in Firefox
for example. "Ctrl + scroll up" increases the font size, which is
quite similar to zooming in.

The same kind of choice is seen with respect to panning the document
v/s panning the viewport when you click and drag. IIRC (and I am not
very sure), the postscript viewer gv seems counter-intuitive in that
sense, since it pans the viewport ... when you click and drag to the
left, the document moves right! Other viewers like evince pan the
document instead.

> I would like to offer that just because Gnome says do it this way that it
> should not be locked down to that function.  I would very much prefer a
> buggy version in this respect.

The Gnome HIG is in place to make sure that Gnome the desktop has a
standard look and feel for all applications. But that doesn't mean
that anything has to be locked down ... there is no reason why the app
can't provide customised interfaces.

Since Dia has a more specialised audience than most desktop apps, I
would wager that a large number of them come with entrenched habits
like yours. Maybe Dia should specifically have some easily settable
preferences or even profiles for these users.

Same goes for people with specialised pointer devices, like the OP.
The current zoom enhancements being discussed could also include a
patch to the preferences code to select a different interaction when
using a trackball. A preference like that could even make sense at the
desktop level in Gnome itself!

Sameer.
-- 
Research Scholar, Department of CSE, IIT Bombay
http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/~sameerds/