[ge-talk] Mouseclick options

[Ryan Leavengood]

On 7/6/07, Kevin Field <kev at brantaero.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah, actually, I think you're right.  This would imply, then, that we
> don't even need double-clicks in the OS, right?  As long as we can
> guarantee two buttons, we use left for "open" and right for "stats and
> options", generally (in Tracker, web browsers, whatever context.)  So
> we'd just get rid of that as a general OS mouse option, and make it a
> Tracker thing (if people insist on having the option...).

I don't think the entire concept of a double-click should be removed.
For one thing, we shouldn't make developers have to go without it, or
worse, implement their own double-clicking mechanism if they need it.
It definitely needs to remain at the OS level for consistency. Plus
Tracker will need to be able to fall back on that (and I expect
double-clicking will be the default as well.)

> Actually, I'm not sure I fully agree that it's all or none.
> Consistency is good, but we still have many widgets out there that do
> essentially the same thing.  For example, a top-menu versus a drop-down
> box versus a radio button group.  Would it be that terrible to add a
> pie widget to the group of UI elements available to a developer, and
> use Tracker as a place to show it off?  We could even make *that* a
> user option.

I used Firefox with the radial context pie menu add-on a while ago
(but haven't used it since then) and found it pretty interesting. For
those interested:

http://www.radialthinking.de/radialcontext/

It definitely makes one more efficient once the muscle memory sets in.
But of course for this to work right the menus must always be the
same.

For the fun of it I may implement a BeOS pie menu, but I'm not sure
the other Haiku developers would want it added to our tree ;)

Ryan