Re: colorsel keynav

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com> writes: 
> Sounds good! (Can you can use all four arrow keys to move around the
> circle, rather than just left/right or up/down?  Otherwise things could
> get confusing...)

Yep, I'm on it. ;-)
 
> I prefer the sound of (a) here, although it's hard to say without seeing
> it in practice with different themes.  (By "use gray border by default",
> do you mean "some hard-coded gray" or "some appropriate colour chosen
> from the theme"?).  

Not sure themes have an appropriate color always, though maybe one of
them would work. Would require some experimentation.

> For (b), did you mean show the whole dialog on a neutral grey
> background, or just the colour wheel?  Ugliness aside, you could get
> away with showing just the colour wheel on a grey slab, provided there
> weren't any text labels included on the slab too. 

Right, that's my thought (just the wheel) - in fact the Gimp does this
- and there's some rationale, since if you have some horrible hot pink
theme, it would mess up your color perception, so the gray slab is
useful to be able to properly see the color you're choosing.
 
> Another option might be just to change the appearance of the selection
> "cursors" in the circle/triangle depending on which of the two had
> focus.  (Sort of like the "secondary highlighting" you get in list/tree
> controls that lets you see which items are selected even though the
> control no longer has focus).

Good idea, I'll experiment with that.
 
> One idea off the top of my head that I've seen used elsewhere would be
> to draw a small dot of a contrasting colour in the centre of the active
> palette cell.  (The hard part is finding the most contrasting colour for
> any given cell... perhaps to satisfy everyone the "dot" would actually
> need to be three concentric circles-- one black, one white, and one the
> XOR of the colour in the cell!)

I'm sure with all the Gimp hackers around we can come up with a
"contrasting color" algorithm, this isn't a bad idea.
 
> Hmm, I guess not.  A textual description of the button will need to be
> available to the accessibility API too-- but that's a little further
> down the road!

Right. (If it had a tooltip, which it should, that would help too.)
 
> Sounds excellent... now all we need to work on is the other ten
> gazillion dialogs in gtk and GNOME that need similar treatment  :o)
> 

Isn't it depressing? ;-)

I think the colorsel here is one of the worst possible though, since
it contains two custom widgets (color triangle and palette). Most
dialogs will just need going through and adding the mnemonics, which
we've just made a lot easier than before, and while we're at it some
tooltips would be nice.

Havoc