Context View scrolling mockup

[Revak Colomar]

On Sat, 2009-02-28 at 20:54 +0000, Gary Steinert wrote:
> Here's my idea for scrolling within the CV.

> A mockup is attached, excuse my poor image skills =P
> The dark grey areas represent the widgets (sized relative to the
> widgets size) and the blue highlight shows the current view (the part
> of the CV on display).
This might work well. The question that remains is how to actually
represent the widgets. Thumbnails with correct aspect ratio would be too
wide but we still need something recognizeable. So it would either have
to be vertical text or some kind of very tall icon. 
> This would allow us to provide continuous scrolling (by dragging the
> blue highlight), the current taskbar-style navigation could be
> retained and used for by-widget scrolling and adding and removing
> widgets (as it is currently).
I'm not sure if having both ways would be a good idea. Might be more
confusing than helpful. If both discrete and continuous scrolling can be
done with the same control this would be great, but having the two kinds
of scrolling done with different controls in different orientations
would not be very intuitive.
But this gives me another idea: Why not adding widgets by dragging them
from the "pool" directly onto our new "scrollbar"? This would match the
way widgets are placed on Plasma panels and would be a way of direct
manipulation. I don't know how complicated this would be to implement,
but drag & drop is something users of current OSes know quite well. That
way we could get rid of the "taskbar" completely while keeping scrolling
and adding widgets intuitive. In "configuration mode" it would also be
possible to move or remove widgets by dragging them along the
"scrollbar" or out of it. A click on the Wrench-Icon (which should be
placed at the bottom of the scrollbar) would thn change from scrolling
mode to configuration mode and open a list of widgets to be dragged onto
the bar. 
If this textual description doesn't make it clear, just tell me and I'll
do a mockup as soon as I get the time.
> 
> Would be good to hear what you guys think about it. Not sure how well
> it would work, or how possible it is. But i think it would solve our
> current scrolling issues.
> 
Having just one normal scrollbar would still be the best thing I guess,
but this way should still be less confusing than having two scrollbars.
I'm still not sure what position would be best for it though. I guess
we'd have to play around with it to find that out.
> 
> @colomar, hope this makes more sense than my description =P
> 
Yes, now I get it ;)
> 
> Gary Steinert
> 
This is indeed quite a complicated matter but I'm confident we'll find a
practicable solution for it.

Thomas Pfeiffer