Re: [Usability] A (rather long) list of GNOME usability issues

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

2005/10/17, Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert novell com>:
> Another thing I have been pondering about lately is the "passthru" click
> to raise windows - some wm's used to have this as an option years ago -
> and I think Mac OS X does this too. What I mean is that if you click to
> raise a window, that click does not do anything in the program itself.
> This is most evident with the Gimp for example - you have several
> windows open, and you click to raise one of them. Oops, better not have
> a drawing tool selected to do that..

With metacity, using ALT while clicking works, but is of course a
little inconvenient. In my opinion, unconditional passthru would need
visual hinting (more than the titlebar) that tells the user "no, you
can't click this button that is in your plain view yet, you have to
focus the window first", otherwise there would be lots of furstration
about buttons that do not work. But such visual hinting has other
considerations, which in my mind surpass the problem of clicking where
it doesn't count. UI designs should have enough padding to make it
possible at all times, right ?-)

> Then again, these two make an interesting problem together when a user
> has click to focus..! Argh. Ideas? Can we capture a "click" but let
> "user drags folder from window" go through? Is this at all possible?

You could introduce a minor timeout for raising, and check if the
pointer has moved over $TOLERANCE pixels and then decide whether to
raise the window or not. If release happens within the timeout, then
you can raise immediately. Maybe also if there's nothing to drag under
the cursor.

The tricky part is to determine what the value of $TOLERANCE is so
that you don't cancel raising too easily.

--
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi
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