[haiku] Re: Suggestions to change double click on window title behaviour
- From: Johan Aires Rastén <johan@xxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 17:06:36 +0100
Ari, Maxime and Truls:
If you think double click on title to minimize/hide is good, please add some
reasons why you think it is. If you don't, you're only expressing your
personal taste and not arguing your point.
I tried to argue that it could be confusing to newbies (or those people who
need to use computers but never seem to grasp even the "easiest" things),
that it crammed too many features into a single widget and later I added
that it might be inconsistent with what happens when you double click other
things. A good start for a counter argument might be to try to invalidate
those claims, or tell why you think it's not relevant. For example if you
consider Haiku's target market to be exclusively people with plenty of
computer experience, that would pretty much blow my arguments about user
friendliness out the window. Otherwise you might have to elaborate why you
think this is easy to use and understand for everybody.
@Ari
Nobody's talking about double click close :) That would be even worse of
course. On a side note, when I began at university, you could kill
applications by middle mouse clicking their title. Sure it was very useful
once you adapted to it, but it was still a bad design :)
@Maxime:
You appear to consider a narrow tab very important. Why do you think those
5mm you gain more important than improved usability? Or is it that you don't
think it would make the UI more usable (for the Haiku target group, not just
yourself)? What about people with smaller screen or those who need to use
lower resolution because of reduced eye-sight (scalable GUIs would be a
better solution, but until we have that..)?
@Truls:
Not everybody has a need or desire to optimize their computing. That kind of
reasoning, if taken to the extreme, could lead to all other GUI components
being removed - because there are keyboard shortcuts and once you know them
the GUI is just a waste of space :) Do you happen to be a big fan of Emacs?
;) I've met plenty of people who do always go to Edit menu and select Copy,
rather than learning Ctrl-c. I don't know exactly why but I guess it's that
they don't think it's worth the bother. Are these people included in what
you perceive as Haiku's target audience?
The UI becoming cleaner with only one button on each side is a valid
argument, but I think hiding windows is important enough to justify one more
button (see reasoning below). I don't think accidentally clicking the wrong
button is any easier than accidentally double clicking the title.
And I strongly disagree with adding a window context menu to the middle
mouse button for these reasons:
- One of my earlier points was the title already has too many overloaded
(hidden) functions.
- Most PCs might have 3-button mice but what about laptops, computers with
touch screens, Macs or people who use pen+tablet?
- Context are opened with the right mouse button everywhere else.
The posters above made me think about one thing though.. Hiding windows is
used for two slightly different purposes.
A) To avoid filling the screen with windows. Hiding is more of a workaround
than a solution to this. If we get better tools for using workspaces this
problem might be eliminated, thus reducing the need for a hide/minimize
button.
B) To hide windows that are only occasionally required, for example a music
player or an IM conversation. Maybe this be solved in some better way too?
To me it's essential to be able to hide these kind of background services.
One possible idea would be to stick the music player on a separate workspace
and close the IM windows instead of hiding.
And this led me to some other thoughts.. No complete ideas, just
brainstorming with you :)
From a pure user point of view, is there really such a big difference
between a hidden application and a non-running application? Would it be
possible to eliminate this difference, and could it benefit the users? If
you look at opening a document in an editor, then closing and hiding would
be identical if the system instantly saved all changes and the undo history.
Modern web browsers are capable of saving open pages on exit thus making
close and hide virtually the same. Of course starting an application and
restoring for example web pages takes more time than unhiding while the
latter uses more memory. However, I feel that this is because of limitations
in software and hardware rather than in concept. Would a system that
instantly restores any application be considered "ideal", and how close to
this could we get in reality?
//Johan
On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Truls Becken <truls.becken@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> Ari Haviv wrote:
>
> > I don't think double-click to minimize is 'bad' design...though double
> click
> > to close sounds like a bad idea.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > but I think there should be a minimize button so that users wouldn't need
> to
> > read a manual just to use Haiku.
>
> First, it's not like you can't use the OS just because you can't
> minimize windows. Second, how long does take until you discover what
> double-click does? Two days? After that, a minimize button would just
> take up space for no reason and make it easier to hit the wrong button
> - having a single button on each side of the tab avoids this. I think
> the design is more efficient the way it is.
>
> > And there should also be a context menu on the tab which would include
> min,
> > max, close, send to back etc. The user would then be able to discover all
> > the UI functions and also their keyboard shortcuts.
>
> A context menu opened by middle-clicking would be good for
> discoverability. It should include a "Send To" or "Move To" submenu
> for moving the window to another workspace.
>
> -Truls
>
>
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