Re: [Usability]Middle mouse button in galeon

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

Hello Tommi,

On 16 Nov 2002, Tommi Komulainen wrote:

> I had considered all but the last point, I'll try to explain better why
> I think they shouldn't cause any serious trouble.  First of all, we can
> make pasting by middle-button work on mouse down; you only paste on text
> entries so it's probably reasonable to do pasting instead of gestures
> there.

Unfortunately this is not true. I regularly select an URL and middle-paste
it into a non-textarea part of the browser window, and the browser will
load that URL for me.

> Second, there's a threshold for mouse movement for detecting when mouse

OK, I wasn't aware of that.

> begins a gesture by accident?  Is it that much worse than starting a
> drag by accident?  There's still the visual feedback from the cursor
> changing (from a hand to a pencil) when the gesture begins, so there
> would be prior warning before a gesture is performed.

Granted, but there's still no indication that a _gesture_ is about to
begin.  If I didn't know gestures, the first thing I would think of when
my pointer changed to a pencil is that I could draw on the screen or
something. The difference with starting a drag by accident is that:

1. Drag and drop will only be performed when you drag something to a
drop-sensitive area. When performing a gesture, the area around the point
where it was started, is always sensitive.
2. An accidentally performed gesture can have more drastic consequences
than an accidentally performed drag: it can close the window (dataloss),
load the previous page,etc.

> It would be disruptive, but only for the first time.  Though, I'd prefer
> having them either enabled or disabled by default, not something in
> between.

Disabled is definately better, IMO.

> Another question is that should the gestures be configurable from the
> preferences dialog?  I'm not totally convinced they are a 'power user'
> feature that shouldn't show up in the GUI.  I see them more as a simple
> and powerful feature all users could use to their advantage.

An 'Enable gestures' checkbox in the Preferences probably won't hurt much.
Detailed configuration of gestures belongs with the power-user stuff.

regards,

-- 

Reinout van Schouwen			Artificial Intelligence student
email: reinout cs vu nl			mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
GPG public key http://www.cs.vu.nl/~reinout/reinout.asc