User interface issues

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:18:48 +0200, Elvis Stansvik wrote:
> 2011/8/12 C. Boemann <cbo at boemann.dk>:
>> On Friday 12 August 2011 15:08:51 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>>> On Friday 12 August 2011 Aug, Cyrille Berger Skott wrote:
>>> > On Friday 12 August 2011, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>>> > > For the text shape, in Stage and Words, no matter which tool is
>>> > > selected, clicking inside the shape should activate the text 
>>> tool
>>> > > without any extra click (and show, for movable text shapes) a 
>>> big
>>> > > border indicating where to click to move.
>>> >
>>> > A suggestion also would be to do like for plasma widgets, and 
>>> when the
>>> > user overlay a shape, it shows the border, if he clicks on the 
>>> handles,
>>> > he would start moving/rotating/scaling the shape, and outside of 
>>> the
>>> > handles, he would be editing the content. Also we could show at 
>>> that
>>> > point, next to the shape, the list of tools that he can choose to 
>>> edit
>>> > the shape. (post 2.4 idea, though).
>>>
>>> Yes, that would be beautiful. It wouldn't even be terribly 
>>> difficult to
>>> implement, I am fairly sure of that.
>> I like it too, but am a bit curious how it would work with for 
>> example all of
>> kritas tools. To be precise the layers of krita are shapes right.. 
>> so the
>> would pop up handles too??
>>
>> Or in fact any shape that has more than one tool to edit the content
>
> If the above concerns can be solved, I'm all +1 for this idea as 
> well.
>
> Elvis

+1 from me to this solution in general as well. It is pretty similar to 
what other office applications
do, with the main difference of hovering vs. having to click the border 
(which is often pretty difficult
in other applications since they are sooo thin). There are some more 
things to consider here, though:

1. Plasma widgets have only a border at one side. This works okay for 
them, but it makes resizing of
shapes sort of difficult, because you only have one fixed point. For 
example if I have a shape and
want to expand it to the right and to the bottom, with the method used 
for Plasma widgets,
I'd have to first move it downward and to the right and then expand it 
to the top-left.

It gets even more difficult for more complex shapes like stars etc.

Therefore we'd still have to display a border all-around the shape 
(which we can make a lot wider than
it currently is to get a bigger click-area because it only appears on 
hover) with multiple resize-handles.

2. We'd still have to come up with a different method for Plasma-Active 
because there is no such thing
as hover on a touchscreen.

Thomas