Re: Singe click selection with checkboxes

[Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer lunden gmail com>]

On 9/4/05, Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org> wrote:

While I find your remarks on issues with single-click interfaces
interesting, I don't think your solution is convincing.

Honestly, I'm not sure either. But something is missing IMO, and so I bring the subject up to see what solutions may exist.

Having that many
UI elements in the interface would simply clutter the directory view.

I thought not, even though there will be more elements as such. But to make sure, I made two simple mock-ups, which can be found here: http://student.gamemaker.nu/~krilun030/images/nautilus/icon-mode.jpg and http://student.gamemaker.nu/~krilun030/images/nautilus/list-mode.jpg

Bear with the poor execution, I'm not much good with image manipulations and this was a five minute operation in Gimp. =) However, it gives an indication I think. Also, it's quite possible that all selected elements should look like the "tmp" folder, that is, change background too for clarity - the checkbox is more of the "handle" that does the job. Being a checkbox makes it more clear what it does, although it could be any icon as such.

My personal reflection after looking at these images is that for icon view it is really unobtrusive, and it doesn't bother me in list view either (if someone aligned them a bit better ;-). I feel like I could easily click around, selecting a few files and then drag them somewhere. However, that is just my personal opinion, and I don't want to come of as if I defend the idea solely because it was mine to begin with.

IMHO not many users activate multiple files at once, except for queueing
files in music or video players.

I don't think this is about activation. But what I do all the time is that I sort, I move, I copy, I delete, I edit, I queue and so on - just what a file manager is for - and I do it with multiple files, because often you want to do this with multiple files. But if we talk activation, if this was available I could rapidly click two movies checkboxes then right-click->open and they would both queue in Totem. Or I could move them by a simple drag. And so on.
 

Howerver, I think it would make sense to have some kind of toggle button
for notebooks, which allow you to select rather than activate  (cf.
composite keynav, just that the modifiers are sticky), i.e.
<special-button-press> => clicks on files are treated as selection =>
<special-button-release>. I think we already provide means to lock a
particular modifier through our accessibility framework. It would be
excellent if two short subsequent presses of ctrl could be bound to
"lock ctrl" and a later press to "release ctrl".

Well, I disagree. If I have to press buttons for the behaviour to work, that's more or less the same as it is now, isn't it? And it is by no means more intuitive. The idea was - among other things - to be able to easily and intuitively make selections *and* operation with the mouse/touch pad/etc only.

Then again, that probably is a step forward if we are talking accessibility for people having a hard time doing several things at once, so it's not bad either. Just not what I meant.

Maybe I'm just really, really lazy (I'd say comfortable hehe) but this is something that actually do nag me under daily use. Including when I wanted to copy my mockups to the server. :)

Thanks for your view on matters!

-- Stoffe

--
Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>


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-- 
Kristoffer Lundén
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