[Kde-games-devel] KGoldunner startup and New Game changes

[Ian Wadham]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:20 pm, Parker Coates wrote:
> When I said a slider would be more intuitive, I meant intuitive based
> on previous computer experience, not real world experience. Users are
> indeed familiar with scrollbars, but all their previous experience
> (including the cases you mention) leads them to believe that
> scrollbars are used to pan spatially with a widget, not to select
> items from a list.
>
> When I first saw the scrollbar, I assumed the dialog wasn't big enough
> to show everything, so I resize it, but the scrollbar remained. Only
> after using the scrollbar did I discover that it was used to select a
> starting level.
>
Hmmm ... this is interesting.  I coded this stuff several years ago, for
Qt 1 and 2.  The metaphor I was looking for was the use of the scrollbar
to "thumb" through several "pages" of levels quickly, using the thumbnail
sketch to preview the look of each level.  A similar idea is used to this day,
in Adobe Reader v7.0, for skimming large documents.  It goes back to
the days of the Xerox Star workstation.

Back in Qt 1/2 the constructor was, roughly speaking:
          QScrollBar (minValue, maxValue, smallStep, largeStep,
                             startValue, orientation, parent);
and the doco made great play, IIRC, with how you could use a scrollbar
to manage an integer range.  It seemed to be ideal for my purpose.  The
semantics and usage of QScrollBar seem to have drifted somewhat
since then, so I get your point.  Now it is mainly intended for widget
contents that are too big for the screen-space available.

Maybe the proper solution is to have a vertical scrollbar on the right
of the thumbnail display in a QScrollArea.  But then QScrollArea seems
to be intended mainly for handling single images and lists, not pages of
images or text.  What do you think, Parker?  I still think a scrollbar is
quicker and easier to operate than a slider.

> PS: I would also recommend that you replace the level QLineEdit with a
> QSpinBox since it has its own validator that automatically prevents
> the user from entering non-numeric characters or out-of-range numbers.
> It also adds increment/decrement buttons
>
Thanks ... good idea.  I think the QLineEdit  is another Qt 1/2 holdover.

Thanks for your feedback, Parker, cheers, Ian W.