Re: panel focus indication

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Bill Haneman wrote:

> * panel focus on click is the main complain-generator,
>   and doesn't seem necessary to me;

I'm not even sure it's quite as serious as that-- my interpretation was
that most of the complaints have been voiced by some of the many who use
focus-follows-pointer mode, for whom, since we chose to use the prelight
mechanism, the panel needlessly (and annoyingly) highlights whenever
they go anywhere near it to click on a menu/applet/whatever.

My guess is that only highlighting the panel (with whatever method we
choose) when the panel background is clicked or tabbed-to-- in other
words, when it truly has keyboard focus-- would eradicate most of the
complaints, since most users will never need to do either of those
things in everyday usage.

If we did that, we might also want to make a special case of not
focusing/highlighting the panel when you *right*-click on its
background.  That's still a fairly common operation for most users, so
the highlight might still be annoying.  And I can't really think of any
usability reason why you'd need the panel to get keyboard focus when you
right-clicked on it-- focus would almost certainly move elsewhere
immediately as a result of the action you selected from the pop-up menu,
so it seems a bit pointless.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems