Re: People widgets plans

["Marco Pesenti Gritti" <mpgritti gmail com>]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
> We had discussed doing the details slideout on hover before, but the
> blocking issue for that was figuring out:
>
>  - Mousing to the slideout - slideout should stay up
>  - Mousing to the next item - slideout should go to that items
>
> So you would need something like the GtkMenu "stay up triangle", which
> we spent a lot of time on, though it works well now. I never wanted to
> commit to trying to port those algorithms code to Bigboard, but it might
> not be a huge job.
>
> Then you'd have to figure out if those slideouts are annoying:
>
>  - There would be quite a bit of flashing
>  - If you accidentally moused over the bigboard, you'd get a popup
>   and would have to mouse back over it's whole width to get it
>   to go down.
>
> Those are questions that may not be answerable without actually trying
> it out and seeing how it feels.

Yeah, I think implementing a good behavior is not going to be trivial
and will need some experimentation.

I never felt it annoying in gmail (on a pretty similar UI), which
gives some confidence that it would feel good once it's properly
implemented.

> You'd also need to figure out the interaction of it with the music
> tooltip, though possibly we could just integrate that information (the
> cover art, etc), into the details slideout.
>
> I think the slideout on right click on the file stock is just a bit
> weird and a lot of people won't find it.

I agree.

> I'm not sure why it feels
> cryptically hidden while the menu doesn't feel hidden in the file
> browser - one reason I think is that the file stock is slightly "neither
> here or there" graphically ... it doesn't look quite like a menu, or a
> web page, or a file manager, so there isn't a lot of built-in
> expectation for how it should behave.

Yep, that's probably it.

Marco