Re: some thoughts

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Re: some thoughts
by Gabriel Gazzán on Wednesday 06/Sep/2006, @10:25

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

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Office Suite
·   Also by Gabriel Gazzán
·   Contact author

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