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Re: some thoughts
by Boudewijn on Tuesday 05/Sep/2006, @10:01
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Just getting a drop-down slider was already really hard! We took the example for that from Photoshop 5.5 for OS X. Coding custom widgets like these takes a lot of time, so I cannot promise we'll be able to have the time to code something like you mention.
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Re: some thoughts
by Gabriel Gazzán on Tuesday 05/Sep/2006, @10:58
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I know, I know, I was asking just in case... ;)
What would be really great is if Qt libraries themselves implemented such a widget, don't you think?
And in the end, it maybe worth it for Trolltech if they want to attract Adobe to choose Qt for their Linux port of Photoshop. ;) ;)
Thanks anyway for all your efforts!
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Re: some thoughts
by ac on Tuesday 05/Sep/2006, @11:18
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> I mean, values appearing just as underlined colored numbers, over which the user can drag left/right to decrease/increase them, or just click on them to manually enter it's numeric value?
Can you provide the screenshot of how this looks like in Adobe programs, and explain the functionality in a bit more details? Maybe someone will feel inspired and start hacking...
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Re: some thoughts
by Gabriel Gazzán on Tuesday 05/Sep/2006, @12:06
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woohoo! :)))
well, sorry... ;)
here is an image with 4 screenshots of an effects palette showing how it looks. The last two are perhaps not as frequently used, but I put it here for reference.
The widget is really simple, so simple I would say it's almost the absense of it what makes it so great:
- If I want to change a parameter calles, let's say, Brightness. The program presents it's name and to the right the value, there's no input box, just the underlines value, as if it were an Internet link.
- If I press left mouse button over the value and drag to the left, I decrease the value (pressing Shift while doing this, will change the value by ten units increments).
- If I press left mouse button over the value and drag to the right, I increase the value (pressing Shift while doing this, will change the value by ten units increments).
- If I single press left mouse button over the value and release it, then the value appears surrounded by a white box (with the value selected) to let me input a new value to replace the current one. (At this moment, pressing right mouse button allows the standard Cut, Copy, Paste operations with the value).
- If I single press right mouse button over the value a context menu appears offering to setup the limits the "virtual slider" (let's call it that way) moves between when dragging to change values, and also to reset this parameter to the default value.
Basically that would be all. If you have any doubt I am willing to help.
And thanks for just trying! :)
Adobe-mini_widgets.jpg
230KB (235577 bytes)
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Re: some thoughts
by Gabriel Gazzán on Tuesday 05/Sep/2006, @12:15
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I forgot to mention...
it doesn't show on the screenshots, but when the mouse pointer is over the value it is shaped almost equal as when you are using an Internet browser (a hand with the index finger pointing upwards) but it also shows tiny left-right pointing arrows to the sides of the index finger, to indicate the direction of possible movement. Once the user starts dragging, the hand disappears and only the tiny arrows remains on the screen.
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Adobe patents/copyright on widgets?
by Anon on Tuesday 05/Sep/2006, @23:54
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I'd be careful. I know Adobe has in the past sued people like Macromedia for creating similar interfaces to its products...
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Re: Adobe patents/copyright on widgets?
by Jaroslaw Staniek on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @03:18
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And then it bought them out :)
Don't worry, Adobe has not enough money to buy KDE.org...
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Re: Adobe patents/copyright on widgets?
by sebastian on Friday 08/Sep/2006, @08:12
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There can't be any copyright on this. FLTK is using such wifgets a while now. I really like the concept. Agreed, I don't like the way KDE is mostly using MS Windows like widgets. Toolkits like FLTK provide some astonishingly well though widgets, take the file selectors for example - just intuitive and simple.
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Re: some thoughts
by Thomas Zander on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @02:09
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I'm personally less then impressed by these widgets. They are quite unlike anything I ever saw and I'm pretty sure many will not see it as something they can alter at all without being trained to do so.
And in the end the small buttons are not taking a lot of space at all so the advantages are pretty small to begin with.
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Re: some thoughts
by me on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @05:23
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These widgets are *very* nicely usable. To be honest, I think opensource lacks a little in the widget-department. For example, there are STILL input fields for INTs from 0 to 100 that have up-and-down-arrows. How useless is that?
It would make sense if one could hold the field and then move the mouose to adjust the value, but who actually taps these two buttons?
Honestly, there's a lot of stuff, especially annoying in krita, karbon14 etc.
I know this sounds harsh, and we all know that I won't commit any coolSliderThingy.{h,cpp} to svn myself, but please, try these widgets first! You'll see, training is not needed!
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Re: some thoughts
by BenAtPlay on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @07:40
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The Adobe widget looks like a subclassed QLabel with the mouseMove/mousePress/mouseRelease events overriden. It shouldn't be too hard to override. The difficult part would be to get the context menu working right IMHO.
Cheers
Ben
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Re: some thoughts
by ac on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @07:48
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> And in the end the small buttons are not taking a lot of space at all so the advantages are pretty small to begin with.
It's true that those small up and down buttons do not take up much space, but I think they are entirely useless. Something like a QSlider is much better suited to vary a quantity over a fixed range. It seems to me that this proposed widget is basically a slider without actually showing it. How about temporarily displaying the slider when it's in "drag mode"?
By the way, what is this context menu good for? If I understand you correctly, you can already enter a specific value by simply clicking on the widget,
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Re: some thoughts
by Gabriel Gazzán on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @09:31
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- The "Edit Values..." option in the context menu mainly allows the user to redefine the span of the slider (its Mínimum and Maximum values). This is sometimes useful in certain cases where the default span is so big that you lose precision while dragging (perhaps changing from 1 to 2 is already a great change in the effect, but as the slider goes from -1000 to + 1000, each time you drag the value changes too much and the slider turns "incontrolable", so lowering the span of the slider increases this precision while dragging and makes it comfortable again).
In theory the span should be preset by the programmer to "useful" values, but often users use effects in situations not foreseen by the programmer, so I guess is in these cases when this option is more appreciated.
- The other useful option in the context menu, is one allowing to "Reset" the value to their default state. Good after you've been experimenting and want to return safe home. :)
p.s. I completely agree on the current state of sliders in Qt/KDE, I never use them, to me they are useless and I end entering values by hand, which is very disrupting, workflow wise.
"Lightwave 3D" and "3ds max" are good examples of programs with good and useful sliders, but to be honest since Adobe introduced this kind of "nano" slider I prefer it over everything else, as they've had a very strong impact in how the (same) applications feel by improving the workflow tremendously.
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Re: some thoughts
by Gabriel Gazzán on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @16:36
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> p.s. I completely agree on the current state of sliders in Qt/KDE
I really meant the up and down buttons to the right of numeric input boxes, not the sliders.
My confusion came from the fact that in some programs (e.g. Autodesk 3ds Max) this buttons function as sliders when dragging up and down over them, so I tend to see them as sliders too.
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Re: some thoughts
by Gabriel Gazzán on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @10:25
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I thing that the beauty of this kind of "hidden slider" is that the precision is not restricted to the small screen space where the slider resides.
Let me explain myself:
If you put a visual slider widget on the screen you have to make it "small" (I still haven't seen widgets with a screen wide extension) :)
But this small extension constraints you to put all the possible values the slider could take, from one extreme to the other, so I could end with a 3cm long widget for changing values from -500 to +500, or -2000 to +2000, so this will make the slider behave with a very low precision, mining its usefulness.
With this "hiden slider" paradigm the extension is also "virtual", so in theory it could be made as long as necessary to make the slider progress in a much more soft way, making it more useful.
Besides that, if the user wants to enter a value directly, he still can.
The other thing I would like to refute, is that this kind of solution is not intuitive.
In this Internet era, if there is something users (even novice ones) know, is that if there is a colored underlined word in the middle of the screen, they could click on it to make something happen.
In this case, what needs to be made clear to the user is that they can not only press on it, but to also drag on it from side to side, and I think that this is the main reason for Adobe chosing to show a cursor with an index pointing hand with left and right arrows when over the "hidden slider".
Finally, I teach Adobe and 3D animation programs since more than 5 years ago, and let me say this is one of the features people love at first sight in the new versions of Adobe programs, perhaps followed by the new dockable option palettes (something Krita already has! kudos!)
I really think this is the way to go, not only for Qt/KDE, but in general for interfaces.
But of course it's just my opinion.
Cheers
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Re: some thoughts
by Ben Meyer on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @02:18
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Do you have a screenshot of this widget somewhere?
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