[ge-talk] Mouseclick options

[Waldemar Kornewald]

Hi,

On 7/10/07, Ryan Leavengood <leavengood at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/9/07, Kevin Field <kev at brantaero.com> wrote:
> >
> > Why not?  If Tracker is the only place it's actually used, and it's not
> > needed there, why would other developers need it?  Consistency with
> > what exactly?  Other OSes?
>
> I don't have BeOS to test right now, but at least on my current Ubuntu
> system, double-clicking is also used to select words in text. I think
> power users use this a fair amount. Double clicking also selects all
> the text in the Firefox address bar, and I believe combo boxes behave
> like that on most OSes. This too is useful.

I think some of you have forgotten the actual reason why double-clicking is bad:
Many users just don't know when single-click is used (e.g., an icon in
the Deskbar is opened with single-click) and when double-click is used
(in Tracker and on Desktop). Almost every control needs single-click,
but Tracker is the only exception. It's just not consistent.

> Plus there are plenty of people who will prefer to double-click in
> Tracker as well. So double-clicking won't be going away. I don't see
> why you are so eager to get rid of it as long as you have a
> single-click option. It isn't like we have to choose only one.

I think for the sake of consistency and simplicity we should choose
only one behavior and not allow to fundamentally change the OS that
way. My primary reason for this is that simply replacing double- with
single-click is not really an ideal solution, either.

This is what I sent to the openbeos-cdt list, but nobody wanted to
reply, so I guess nobody really likes the idea:

I think a possible solution to the problem is to slightly change our
mouse actions (system-wide). Instead of overlapping selection and invocation we
should make a clear distinction:
* selection: left-click
* dragging a selection: left-click-drag
* invocation: right-click
* context-menu: right-click
The context menu still appears when right-clicking, but it's slightly
off-placed, so you don't accidentally click on it when invoking.
Invocation can be made more obvious by placing a single menu item
"Open"/"Invoke" under the mouse cursor, so you know that releasing the
mouse will invoke.

I'm not sure if the above suggestion can be made consistent enough
with our current UI model, though (do you select or invoke a tab? do
you select or invoke a checkbox?).

I do agree that this change alone isn't really worth the trouble, but
if we ever make more fundamental changes to our interaction model then
we should at the same time fix all these annoying inconsistencies.

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald