kcombobox wheelmouse scrolling

[Aaron J. Seigo]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sunday 29 September 2002 12:08, Thomas Zander wrote:
> I don't believe the solution of automatic definition of scrollwheel-scope
> will work; the solution presented (by Aaron) will be too subtile to become
> something the user learns as logical. If the user does not learn the
> 'mental-model' behind the GUI (s)he will not be able to forsee when to
> expect. In other words; the user will sometimes get unexpected results, and
> loose confidence in the GUI.

the point is not to get the user to learn, but to have the UI react in a way 
the user would expect it to, namely:

 o if scrolling the web page, continue to scroll it
 o if purposefully positioned over a combobox, scroll it

this approach would require testing to verify its workability, but i feel it 
may work well =)

this is based on the assumption that this is primarily (exclusively?) a 
problem with comboboxes in the khtml widget / konqueror...

btw, disabling scrolling in comboboxes would break with every other widget 
that supports multiple selection options in a single element, causing the 
user to learn a mental model of which can be and which not be scrolled.

> So because the scrolling of the combobox has an immidiate effect you
> believe it should not be possible to scroll (using the mousewheel)...

no, because scrolling anywhere else in the toolbars scrolls the web page it 
should be consistent with its surroundings. i don't see many other comboboxes 
that have similar roles (except perhaps the location box in the file dialog, 
but even that is somewhat different)

> And what about comboboxes that have a javascript 'onchange' event?

if you position over them and scroll, they change... 

> And the comboboxes/spinboxes that immidiately effect a preview as seen in a
> number of KCMs and dialogs?

does one accidently scroll them? probably not. you position the mouse over 
them and scroll... this is quite different than the situation in the html 
viewer where the scrolling of the html gets snagged by a form widget.

that said, the best would be if a selection is only made after a certain 
period of innactivity, allowing the wheel to act like "spinning a dial". the 
text entries would change as the wheel is spun, but only when the wheel stops 
(as defined by a timeout period) would that selection cause an effect to 
occur.

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
    - Albert Einstein
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE9l0/k1rcusafx20MRAoHaAJ9hKy0ktJ58iLz6rV0c1SmgUalM6wCgi16s
+zeEFCoIciaMl1dCcKcr28Y=
=vP+r
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----