Re: GtkColorPickerButton

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 02:52:56PM -0500, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 02:29:17PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > (In the ASCII art, XXXX means color swatch)
> >   
> >     [  XXXX  Blue      ]
> >     [  XXXX  Green     ]
> >     [  XXXX  Orange    ]
> >     [  XXXX  Purple    ]
> >     [  XXXX  Other...  ]
> 
> I don't see how this is different from having a grid with the names
> in tooltips ?

Differences:

 - it is more similar to an existing widget (option menu)
 - the names are more visible and require fewer steps to read
   (no hover-and-wait)
 - the mouse target for each color is larger
 - the number of colors to choose from is smaller
 - it would use more width on a toolbar
 - if you want "click to apply" and "select" mode to look similar, a
   widget similar to this one can't be used for a "click to apply"
   mode
 
> The applier vs selector behavior of the combo is application
> specific.  In Gnumeric due to the fragmented nature of its selection
> it is easier to frame it as an applier, but the behavior could just
> as easily be different.  The difference arises because I do not
> update the colour combos when the selection moves.  That is my
> choice, or more specificly a choice of MS Office that I happen to
> agree with.

It's not some a priori choice, it has to do with the functionality
you're supporting. i.e. there is a user task (applying the same color
applied most recently) that you're trying to support and make possible
in only 2 steps.

If you disable the "apply" functionality of the color combo, then
clicking anywhere on the color combo opens the menu, instead of
applying, and the combo contains the current selection's properties
instead of the most recently applied property.

At that point the color combo solution is pretty much the same as the
option menu solution, except for the list of differences at the top of
this mail.

It does seem somewhat sucky to me if the color widget looks exactly
the same in both "applier" and "selector" mode - the widgets for those
two behaviors definitely need to be distinguishable, or you don't know
what will happen when you click one. So I think the last bullet under
"Differences" above is not a con to the option menu.

If you compare (selector-mode grid-combo or the OS X option menu) to
(color picker button) then the issue seems to be pretty clear: whether
you expect users to most commonly want a preset color, or most
commonly want an arbitrary color. That's a clear-cut question that can
be answered empirically.

If we can't answer it empirically, perhaps we should even derive this
widget from GtkWidget and make it fully opaque (perhaps has-a button
instead of is-a button), but it might be nicer if we go ahead and
figure this out.

Once you decide on presets-vs-arbitrary, you know whether you need to
decide on grid-vs-std-option-menu.

I don't see any reason to use a similar-looking widget for applier and
selector modes, so I think we should look at the best widget for each
of those orthogonally, and then if they happen to be the same that's
fine but if not that's fine too.

Havoc