Re: "scrollwheel" kind of widget

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 18:35 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 18:01 +0100, Magnus Bergman wrote:
> > A type of widget I'm missing in GTK is something like the scrollbar, but
> > with no particular min/max values. This would be useful for scrolling a
> > canvas with a virtually infinite size, and for zooming (and possibly
> > other things). Irix (which uses something motif-like) has such a widget,
> > see the attached screenshot. (The small button below is used to reset to
> > the default value.)
> 
> I'd love to have such a widget for things like EOG.  Go for it!

  I have made some modifications to the Gtk*Ruler widgets to obtain
similar goal, to incorporate in gnumexp[1] for selecting the area of a
math function to view.  I called it NxpRuler.  So it looks just like a a
normal gtk ruler, except that it highlights on mouse over, and you can
drag it around with button 1, and scale/stretch with button 3.

  I'm very happy with the obtained result.  Already proposed to the Dia
developers to use this widget, a few years ago, but got no feedback :|

  Regarding the thumbwheel approach, yes, it does look more intuitive
for first-time users.  But I think the NxpRuler highlight on mouse over
(and maybe we could change cursor too) makes it obvious that this ruler
is special and can be interacted with.  Moreover, a ruler is very useful
to display distances, whilst the thumbwheel doesn't allow this.

  Regards.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/numexp

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic