On 22 December 2014 at 06:33, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:
Let's keep discussions civil on this list.
Absolutely agree.
On 22 December 2014 at 09:12, Michael Grosberg <grosberg.michael@...400...> wrote:
Jelle Mulder <jelle.mulder2@...360...> writes:
Dear all,
I don't know what made the new slider UI come through, but it absolutely sucks. Why in gods earth does the text input reside beneath the slider drag? Every time I want to set a blur I have to really be afraid to drag the friggin slider to 90+% and then wait and pray for Inkscape to recover from this mishap.
As a user I have to admit this is indeed a problem and it happened to me quite a lot. So, I tried to analyze the reason it fails so much. When people attempt to enter a new numerical value using text input, they first have to either place the cursor in the text, or select the old input in order to overwrite it. The most common use case is changing to a completely different value, so most of the time you'll want to start by selecting the entire value and typing you own. You do that by placing the cursor to the left of the "1" and dragging to the right, or placing it on the rightmost edge and dragging to the left - but I'm guessing most people would go left-to-right.
And herein lies the problem. turns out the cursor is still a widget manipulator if you place it just to the left of the text. In fact, it's still a manipulator even when it's on the center of the leftmost digit.
Worse: the pixels above and below the text are still manipulator territory. touch the widget a pixel above the text and you're screwed. Another design flaw that's relevant is the fact that the icon for "strong" manipulation (the one that is active on the top half of the widget) is vertical and similar in overall shape to the text entry cursor, but its hotspot (the pixel that is used as the center) is at the top, while the hotspot for the text cursor is in the middle. So, try placing the cursor a pixel or two above the text. If you don't focus and only use your peripheral vision, you'll think you are using the text cursor on the center of the text, while in fact you're not.
Thank you for that detailed investigation of the current UI! Obviously the UI is currently not very intuitive. Personally I didn't even realize that the upper part of the slider has a different behavior than the lower part. And it also happens quite often to me that I fail to click into the text area of the slider.
There are currently six ways to set the value:
- Clicking the upper part of the slider to set the value directly - Clicking the lower part of the slider to in-/decrease the value dragging the mouse horizontally - Typing a new value into the text field part - Pressing Up/Down while the focus is within the text field part - Clicking the Up/Down buttons at the right side of the widget - Scrolling the mouse wheel while hovering the widget
Solutions:
- expand the area in which it is a text entry cursor about 6 pixels to the left and affective on the top and bottom of the text as well.
- change the design of the "strong" manipulation so its overall shape is not a vertical line.
- change the hotspot to the middle of the icon.
I agree with Alvin that multiple functionalities within one widget is rather confusing than helping. So I believe a better solution would be to visually split both inputs again like in Inkscape 0.48.x. The slider could visually stay like it is now, though clicking the slider should only have one functionality. People may be able to switch to the other behavior by holding down Ctrl, Shift or Alt when clicking it. Allowing the mouse wheel to change the values might cause changing them by mistake in case you actually want to scroll or zoom the viewport. So IMO that behavior should be removed or just work in combination with a key.
Also I could imagine to extend the functionality of the Up/Down keys to work like in Firebug, i.e. allowing to in-/decrease by 10 holding down Shift and by 0.1 holding down Ctrl.
Sebastian