unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

hi Dmitrijs ;)

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 18:44, Dmitrijs Ledkovs <dmitrij.ledkov@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Open up a very large PDF document (or webpage) e.g. emacs 600 page long pdf
> [1]
>
> User asked to:
> 1) Scroll to half way.
> 2) Scroll to view next three paragraphs at the bottom of the page.
>
> Accelerate mouse-wheel:
> 1) fast scroll wheel action
> 2) slow scroll wheel action
>
> Touch UI:
> 1) rapid flick with a finger
> 2) gentle slide with a finger
>
> Keyboard:
> 1) page down, hold
> 2) arrow key
>
> So far so good.
>
> But what about regular notebooks with synaptic touchpads? or using
> just a mouse pointer?
>
> on a touchpad: two finger scrolling is slow (can't easy scroll large
> chunks of the document)
> mouse pointer: drag the scrollbar or have to click repeatedly the
> arrow button at the top/bottom of the scrollbars
>
> Both of these are IMHO frustrating. Is there a solution to this problem?
>
> Examples:
>
> Docks (various implementation). if you have loads of icons they are
> simply small and fill the whole width, but you generally have a
> magnification of a few icons around the one your are currently
> hovering over. This way you quickly get your mouse-pointer to the area
> of interest (eg. middle of the doc) that section gets magnified and
> you can move your cursor to precisely select the desired near-by icon.
>
> Two scrollbars (full & current section): e.g. [2] here you have two
> timelines top is moths, bottom one is days and the dead centre is the
> current date. If you drag bottom one you get the "precission" scroll,
> and if you drag top one you get "rapid" scroll.
>
> Here is an idea [3] for using orthogonal axis to define "precission"
> scroll:
>  * click and drag downwards/upwards -> rapid scroll
>  * click, hold drag to the left off-the scrollbar, drag up-down ->
> precission scroll
>
> really using the orthogonal axis to define acceleration as in mouse-wheel.
>
> Are there any other ideas? Have any of them been implemented?
> Personally want a Gtk implementation =)
>
> Now with this continious rendering problem there is another issue of
> "jumping scroobar" which can be observed on Google Reader. This one is
> related to delayed loading / rendering.
>
> By default google reader loads a dozen of articles as you scroll down
> it loads more articles and your scrollbar jumps upwards since the
> whole document became larger. In this case the expected behaviour is
> reverse, by default precission scroll is required, with visual
> indication of where-abouts you are in the global document length and
> ability to switch to rapid scrolling (which is not useful at all in
> dynamically loadable documents). No clue how to fix this one.
>
> [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.pdf
> [2] http://www.suse.de/~coolo/opensuse_11.3/
> [3] http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Variable_20Rate_20Scroll_20Bar
>
> ps. Hope this is appropriate for ayatana discussion.
>

I'm loving these

Yeah, actually i would enjoy seeing slow and fast gestures interpreted so
that the mouse can evoke certain items or events while accellerating towards
them (notifications, conversations etc)