Re: [gtk-list] Re: Project : Spin Button

[daniels <daniels mindspring com>]

On Fri, 16 Jan 1998, Owen Taylor wrote:

[snip...]
> (UI critique - spinners can be pretty annoying since they can
> require a lot of button clicks to get to where you want. I would
> almost always prefer having a entry+scale if there are a lot
> of possibilities or a combobox/optionmenu if there are a few.
> But spinners are space efficient if the user actually 
> wants to just increment or decrement the value by one or two.)

A better way to handle this would be to start a timer in the 
background when the user presses down on the button. Then, start
increasing/decreasing the number... sloooowly at first, and then
speeding up the longer the user holds the button down, finally
capping out at some upper limit. Ideally, this would be an
adjustable part of the spinner. Maybe something like:

  void gtk_spinner_set_ramp_speed (GtkSpinner *, int msecs);
  void gtk_spinner_set_ramp_max   (GtkSpinner *, float max);

With this, "speed" would be how long it takes the spinner to get
to maximum climb rate, and "max" would be what the maximum climb
rate is. That way you could tell the spinner to do something like
"take 2.0 seconds to speed up to 50 ticks/second".

Just a thought. :=)

======================================================================
Alan Daniels                                    daniels@mindspring.com
                                                daniels@cc.gatech.edu