KNotificationAreaItem

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday 24 April 2009, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> 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. :)

Hehe, will think about it, but I believe the issue is still valid, even
with good mouse support.

>> 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.

I do not understand what you mean. For me using the mouse wheel on x11
(as on other os) means getting a page to scroll while my mouse is over
the page, not over the scrollbar.

>> 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.

Auntie Nora is one of the personas we use at Canonical. We should
probably move this discussion on the usability ML, but since I do not
think you will change your mind, it's probably useless :(

>> 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.

True for pagers and taskbars, false for desktop background.

Additionally, when you  scroll a document you do not go for one-line
scroll, which means if your wheel event get sent to the taskbar, god
knows how many windows you skipped. You then need to do a very precise
wheel movement to go back to your window because the wheel event sent to
your pager or taskbar requires more precision than just scrolling a bit
up if you scrolled down your document too much.
Of course if you are not using a continuous mouse wheel (using a crappy
mouse, or an Apple Mighty Mouse, or your touchpad scroll area), it's
even worse.

Aurélien