Re: [Usability]Movie Player seek bar problems

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2002-11-28 at 22:03, John McCutchan wrote:
 
> Two possible solutions to this would be
> make the seek bar large enough to get a certain resolution out of it.
> Or have a dialog where you could input the exact time that you want
> to start viewing from. Any suggestions/comments?

Given the way gtk sliders currently work, just adding a textbox or
spinbox beside the slider that's tied to the slider's value is probably
the simplest option.  The HIG recommends doing this anyway, for
situations like this where you might sometimes want finer control than
dragging the slider offers.

A couple of more radical solutions (i.e. probably not easily
implementable and maybe not advisable even if they were):

- have the slider represent only a part of the total movie length...
then as you drag 'past' the beginning or end of the slider, adjust the
start/end points that the slider represents accordingly.  This is
conceptually the same as your suggestion of making the slider long
enough to accommodate the whole movie, except it doesn't make the dialog
any bigger :)  Would probably need to do something clever with the
slider visuals to make it clear what was happening though, ditto when
the movie was playing to make it look as if the slider wasn't just
stuck.  (I guess in the playing case, you could have a 'paging' effect,
so the slider button returned to the start of the slider whenever it
reached the end... that might be distracting though).

- have the resolution increase when you drag the slider slowly, and and
increase when you drag it quickly.  This is how the timer dial works on
my microwave, may not work quite so well on a movie player though :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems