Re: Selection scrolling (was mem. bug)

[Adrian Custer <acuster nature berkeley edu>]

This issue seems to be really hard to get right.


Time sounds terrible.

What you want is something with a high feedback rate so that the users
can train themselves to zoom forward (whatever distance) and then ease
up as they get within range and inch forward to the particular row/col
they want to select. It's that slow down that makes the thing usable and
that depends entirely on a very deterministic feedback loop between the
movement of the mouse and the scroll speed. Adding a time element, I
assume would make the feedback mushy.

This need of users for feedback also means that we are looking for an
indication, as we scroll fast in the "zoom" part of the sequence above,
of the current rate of progression of the scroll. Say I have to get to
row 9583, I'd want to get up to the 9000's and then slow down. I look to
the leftmost of the row numbers to get some indication of where I am, so
those numbers should never change faster than the human eye can find
stability in the leftmost part. IIRC, the max speed was too fast to get
any decent info out of these row numbers.

The current distance algorithm, if I remember correctly, is not equally
usable when gnumeric is maximized as when it is a small window on the
screen (since there is less distance available). Whatever implementation
takes hold should consider both states.

This should be a bug repport probably, but it didn't start out that way
sorry.

cheers,
adrian




On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 10:12, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 05:06:10PM +0100, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
> > this is my biggest usability gripe with Gnumeric.  it happens very
> > often when I want to select a range of data larger than can fit on the
> > screen.  if you try to do this using the mouse, it will suddenly shoot
> > off and start jumping 5000 rows at a time.  considering that the
> > spreadsheet often has no more than a hundred rows, this behaviour
> > seems silly :-)
>
> The auto-scroll interval when moving the mouse outside the sheet is
> variable depending on how far outside you move.  5000 rows is the
> max, and only happens when you've moved quite far.  I've long been
> tempted to make it smarter and to use time as well as distance in
> the selection, but have not had time.
>
> It would be fairly easy to add if anyone was interested.
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