Subject:
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Re: MLCad Suggestions
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.mlcad
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Date:
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Mon, 21 Feb 2000 19:53:53 GMT
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Viewed:
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1831 times
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Steve Hodge <stephenh@ihug.com.au> wrote:
> > A single
> > mouse button can control both operations using a gestural approach: when the
> > user clicks the button and begins dragging, if the drag starts out being
> > vertical, the program enters zooming mode; if the drag starts out being
> > horizontal, the program enters panning mode. (Once the mode is established,
> > the mouse can move horizontally and vertically as usual in either mode).
> Ugh, you said to remove the modes and then put them back in! (with an alternate
> means of activation). And using the mouse movement direction as the factor
> determining which mode to use is bad - it's unintuitive and difficult to do
> reliably (it's very easy to bump the mouse vertically a pixel or two even
> though you mean to make a horizontal movement).
Gestural activation is way different than true modal operation - there is no
additional interface component (the "specification of operation" is part of
the operation itself) and there is no state change either before or after
the operation.
I've been using direction-based gestures for several years and a 5-pixel
drag distance before deciding which direction is being indicated works fine.
As for "unintuitive", that is a matter of opinion. I'd argue that
traversing several levels of menus is at least as unintuitive. Using
vertical movement to specify zoom/scale is already what's done in MLCad.
Using horizontal movement of the same button (which currently does nothing)
for panning does not seem like a great leap to me. In my experience,
panning is more often done in a horizontal direction anyway.
Specific suggestions aside, the issue is how to integrate mouse-driven
modeless pan/zoom into the existing application. With Windows only two mouse
buttons are assumed to be available, both of which are already in use.
Currently the right button doesn't make any use at all of the location within
the drawing window, it just pops up a menu. This argues for moving this
functionality to elsewhere so that the location of the pointer can be
utilized when the button is clicked. Putting the window menus into a small
titlebar for each window would be one solution (but unfortunately takes up
more screen space).
> The most common way of providing pan and zoom functionality is to make dragging
> (that starts) in the views perform the panning operation and have buttons for
> zoom.
I find zoom buttons very clunky - repeated clicking is out. They also lack
the subtlety of mouse dragging, since there is no refinement possible with
buttons.
> A good place to go for user interface design guidelines (or at least examples
> of what not to do) is the User Interface Hall of Shame:
> http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm
I'll take a look...
Regards,
Steve
--
Barb & Steve Demlow | demlow@visi.com | www.visi.com/~demlow/
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: MLCad Suggestions
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| (...) alternate (...) ... (...) I agree it's better than the current system and not really modal operation but I still find it unintuitive. There is no obvious reason why vertical movement should be zoom and horizontal movement should be pan. Worse, (...) (25 years ago, 21-Feb-00, to lugnet.cad.mlcad)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: MLCad Suggestions
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| (...) I agree with this - it's one of the fundamental user interface design guidelines, and something that has tripped me up when using MLCad. (...) Ugh, you said to remove the modes and then put them back in! (with an alternate means of (...) (25 years ago, 20-Feb-00, to lugnet.cad.mlcad)
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