Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 15:41:43 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: kelly@yarmouth (Sean Kelly) Cc: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de, narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) Message-ID: <199602262241.PAA02866@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <9602261957.AA17964@emu.fsl.noaa.gov> from "Sean Kelly" at Feb 26, 96 12:57:11 pm
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> *everything* except the menu bar, which is where you need it (to > indicate that those are active sites and not just labels). The menu bar is conceptually a single button with multiple active areas. So it has a border like you want to indicate it is clickable. > It's impossible to tell at a glance which are the selected or the > deselected buttons in a group of radio or checkbuttons. Does ``out'' > indicate selected or does ``in''? "In". Just like the lids on your drink cups and the punch holes in your election ballots. In addition, Motif 2.0 has the ability to put a "mark" in a selected item as well as shadowing from the upper-left (just like MS-Windows). > The difference between radio and checkbuttons is undersubtle. Radio buttons are round and checkbuttons aren't. In addition, the interface guidelines require you to group-box sets of radio buttons. If you don't, your application is non-conforming. > Finally, the scrollbar sucks: the user comes to understand that > repeated clicking in the trough area goes through pages, so he > happily pages along reading the material when suddenly, clicks > don't work anymore. What happened? The elevator/thumb reached > the cursor, dislodging his train of thought from the tracks of flow. Or the user was clicking in the middle instead of at the bottom (/top) so that the thumb would stop when it cot there (ie: on purpose). 8-). Motif 2.0 has the ability to have an active "page down" area above the down arrow, and another to "page up" below the up arrow. I agree that the location of the arrow buttons on scrollbars is annoying. I would prefer that up and down were adjacent, like NeXTStep, so I don't have to move my mouse as much. The OpenLook scroll-buttons-on-thumb is really, really annoying, since you have to find the thumb each time you want to scroll. > Now, Tcl/Tk is stuck with some of these problems. But it did fix a > few of them: hilighting of active elements when the cursor enters one; > coloring of radio and checkbuttons to indicate selected items, and so > forth. This is possible with Motif, (even 1.x) and does not even violate the visual guidelines. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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