KNotificationAreaItem

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 24 April 2009, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> Unfortunately, more and more people are using laptops with touchpad
> wheels. Are we going to say users: "go buy a *real* mouse!"

no, i'm going to look at the x developers and system integrators and say, "can 
you please write and configure touchpad devices to work as well as they do in 
Microsoft Windows?" i won't even ask for Mac-level competency.

it's shocking how much better the touchpad works in Vista versus OpenSuse on 
my son's laptop. SHOCKING.

as someone who is now working for a distro, perhaps you could help raise 
awareness of these issues as opposed to trying to get upstream to neuter the 
user interface. :)

> > please don't get me wrong,
> > i /do/ see that touchpad wheels introduce problems (trust me, i
> > do...sadly) but imho the solution (to this very problem) was to write an
> > (X wide) MW filter that passes wheelevents only to a customizable
> > whitelist of apps. not to say: "hey my touchpad is crap, can we please
> > not use anything but single leftclicks?"
>
> One usually do not trigger mouse clicks accidentally because it's a
> point-and-click operation. Wheel-scroll is not: you just roll the wheel,
> thinking the mouse is still over the document you are reading. That's
> the whole point of mouse wheel: scrolling without pointing the cursor at
> the scrollbar.

that isn't how wheeling has worked now or ever in x11. again, please direct 
your energy to the right place.

> When the mouse cursor slips out of the window, auntie Nora is helpless

ugh, let's cut the "auntie Nora" crap. it's based an an ageist, sexist and 
highly irrelevant stereotype. let's talk about HCI as a real topic.

> if the browser suddenly switches between tabs, or if the wm switches to
> another window/desktop. This is because mouse-wheel is expected to be a
> very easy-to-undo operation: if you roll a bit too low, just roll it a
> bit up to get where you want. Magical pagers and taskbars break this.

"magical" pagers and taskbars behave identically; roll up a bit and you're 
back to where you were.

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

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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