[openbeos] Re: inconsistency?

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 16:40:20 +0200 CEST, Jonas Sundström
<jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> What's with the overkill? I'm sure people would get the idea of the
> tinted window, even without the fading and the flashing.

Because it covers all cases at once, including a "fullscreen" window
which covers the deskbar area. I'm sure the textual description and
crude ASCII art can't do justice to a full-blown graphical demo, which
I intend to cook up as soon as I find some time (hopefully this
weekend).
 
> IMO a throbbing tint on the window requesting focus would suffice just
> fine. If the window is hidden or covered, Deskbar could do what
> Windows' taskbar does.

See above. It's easy to have something which covers the Deskbar. If
you have 3 sets of visual hinting, you:
1) will surely be informed that something happened (if the screen goes
gray and a red frame comes up on the screen)
2) can choose to postpone your action if the window requiring
attention is somewhat visible (and you can't just miss it because it's
tinted in different colors
3) may use a universal and un-missable target to open whatever sort of
popup window comes up.

Other than that, I might have hinted at having all these events coming
up at the same time, but the user should be able to configure whether
he wants to have the screen fade to gray, the red frame taking over
the screen borders, the window being tinted in red, if the color
should be red indeed or any other at his discretion, and so on.

> Mouse warping is one of the most evil things ever invented in GUI
> systems. The system should never ever move the mouse pointer. Old Macs
> get bonus points for allowing the mouse to be moved even during bootup,
> giving the impression that the mouse is something solid, something
> real. The box may crash or hang, but you can still move the mouse
> pointer. That's respect. That's a good user experience. (Minus the
> crashing of course.)

I agree with you; however I have seen people use mouse warping. I
can't stand it, but some are used to and attached to it. Well, I think
this is already covered, since the mouse as of R5 already warps to any
window that gets focus; no behaviour needs to be changed at all and
it's already configurable in the mouse Preference.


-- 
"Structure is nothing if it is all you've got. Skeletons spook people
if they try to walk around on their own; I really wonder why XML does
not"
Erik Naggum

Other related posts: