Re: Scrolling "seek" sliders

[Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com>]

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 00:49 +1000, James "Doc" Livingston wrote:
> Currently various multi-media application behave differently when the
> "scrolling" (up/down arrow, page up/down mouse wheel) actions are
> performed on their seek slider. There have been bugs (at least 164351
> and 330570) filed against several applications asking that they behave
> like others, and it would be good to have consistent behaviour.

Agreed.

> Currently Totem and Gnome Sound Recorder map "up" to seek forwards in
> time, Sound-Juicer and Rhythmbox map "up" to seek back in time, and
> Banshee and Muine don't seek when the user does this.

Banshee (and Muine?) seeks on CTRL+Left/Right.

> Some of the point for up=forwards are:
> * people associate up with increasing the time from the start
> 

Time is usually displayed on the X axis... sliders for seeking are
usually horizontal... so Up/Down keys for this mess with my mind

> Some of the point for up=backwards are:
> * people associate up with increasing the time remaining (only
> applicable if it's shown to the user)
> * people associate up with "going towards the start", like for
> documents/web pages

Again, for me it's more literal connection with visual objects... if I
press the right arrow, I am scrolling my time graph "into the future."
Volume is my Y axis.

> Some of the point for taking no action:
> * these are "vertical" scroll events and the slider is horizontal, so
> should do nothing

I don't think this is should be a no-action case. I think
representations just should be "on-axis" (of course feelings are going
to differ, this are just how I interpret position)

>From a more technical (and possibly usability) standpoint, my objection
to up/down is that it's used by and is more important to other widgets
(our track views in Banshee/RB), meaning the slider needs focus for the
keys to actually seek. In Banshee you can press CTRL+Left/Right anywhere
and it seeks.

Cheers,
Aaron