Re: [Fwd: Re: scroll bar and drop down list usability]

[Ken Fox <kfox vulpes com>]

Johan Hanson wrote:
> Personally I prefer to drag with the middle mouse button in the direction that
> I want to travel over the common method of moving the document about with a
> hand.

But that breaks the drag-the-object metaphor -- you'd be dragging yourself.
I think a panner has the behavior you want. Would it work to switch between
thumbnail and full-size views in a panner, i.e. don't create a panner as a
separate graphical element, but use the window itself as the panner? Wasn't
there something called a fish-eye-view that provided navigation like this?

> > You press LEAP followed by another key and the display scrolls to the next occurence
> > of that key -- it's basically incremental text search. I'd like to see that
> > feature *everywhere* scrolled text is displayed.
> 
> Many text editors have this feature. JED comes to mind.

Yes, I use emacs i-search all the time. I thought it might be useful for people
to think of this as scrolling/navigation rather than search. For example, with
the Canon Cat, you pressed a "new page" key to start a new page. To scroll by
pages you pressed LEAP followed by "new page". (I've never used a Cat, but this
is my understanding of it.)

The other point is that why limit such a useful navigation feature to advanced
text editors? Why not put this in web browsers, file browsers, shell windows,
etc.?

I agree with all of your features, but I don't understand this one:
>   * If the scrollbar is dragged too quickly, the movement is slowed down by the
>     widget so that the user can see better where she is.

Are you saying it's a feature to force the user to only scroll as fast as the
system can repaint? I think it's better to provide partial (or low-res) display
when a user is scrolling fast.

- Ken