current status Contour - activating/opening a resource with an arrow

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Thursday, June 16, 2011 17:46:08 Mario Fux wrote:
> Ok. Let's try again then ;-). I still think that double tap and double
> click is more or less the same or at least people will get it this way
> (atm I did a survey with n just 1 ;-). And that would be perceived as an
> inconsistency in the KDE software universe. That's what I like to prevent
> as it's difficult enough to sometimes explain to the former Windows users
> that it's no double thing here.

They're pretty different. Mouseclicks require a good amount of hand-eye 
coordination and translating the coordinates from hand to screen, this is not 
necessary for touchscreens as you directly manipulate the object on screen, 
not through some proxy (the mouse). That's a key difference.

In my testing, I often see that when people try a button, and it doesn't react 
the first time, they try double-tapping it. That's a pretty good sign for 
discoverability. Literature seems to support it as one of the more "natural" 
ways of triggering something.

If you're worried about inconsistency, then try to explain (to yourself) how a 
gesture (like the one you proposed) is any more consistent with the desktop 
than single clicking. There is simply no way to make it consistent, and I 
don't believe that people will actually notice this as a problem. In my not so 
humble opinion, it's a made up problem, without any solution.

> But back to the search of a solution. Why and when do you need to select
> (and  not at the same time need to get a context menu with e.g. holding) a
> single item.
> 
> The first thing that came to my mind when I thought about selecting on the 
> touch interface was: circling around the object(s).

Please revisit the earlier thread where we talked about context menues 
(Subject: "Re: Contour/Active global context menus"). It would also be helpful 
to take literature to the rescue, or anything better than "I just tried it 
myself and I find ...". My invitation to convince me was not about repeating 
similar arguments, but coming up with well supported new ones. Doing otherwise 
just creates noise.

As I said, I've taken a good book (O'Reilly's "Designing Gestural Interfaces") 
to see what else we can do, double tapping seems to be the best solution, 
short of using a different one for selecting (which I'm also open to, but 
which is currently lacking).
-- 
sebas

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