icons...

[Gábor Lehel]

> 1) Bringing anything _between_ the tracklabels (i.e. not visually part of the
> glyphs or the background) naturally breaks any sliding, thus transitional
> animations and dragging probably needs to be discarded.
>

Ah. This is indeed a valid concern, albeit nifty animations are
secondary to just getting the whole thing intuitive and discoverable
in the first place. You could still hack it by, upon the user
clicking, hiding the arrows, doing the slide animation, and then
putting the arrows back. Not perfect but maybe it could work well
enough. (And if not - I don't presume to speak for the rest of the
team, but I think we can live without animations.)

As for dragging, that's an interesting idea I wouldn't have thought
of. I don't think it's any great loss, however, precisely because I
wouldn't ever have thought of it being possible to do that, had I not
been told. Would anyone else? Otherwise, it's a feature without an
audience.

>
> 3) !!! The key usability problem with an icon decoration is neither that the
> icons are redundant nor have to be clickable, BUT that they will unpreventably
> attract the mousepointer - as you usually point a click the (weak!)
> triangles/+/- in treeviews instead just (double)click the entire row (or do
> you?)

I don't really see the problem here. If people want to click the
arrows, let them. I was thinking that the arrow and the label text
should be implemented as a single UI element so that whether you click
the arrow, the text, or the space in between makes no difference.
(Note -- I'm not implying that it should visually look any different
(should still look roughly like in Myriam's mail); just that what
-not- to do is to make the arrows be buttons and have the text next to
them separately.)

(As for the treeview -- I *do* in fact tend to click the triangles
rather than double click the entire row, but this is due to
uncertainty about whether clicking the row will result in it
expanding, being added to the playlist, playing, or what. The
triangles are unambiguous.)


-- 
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.