making kickoff have full-width selection rects (on hover)

[Sven Burmeister]

On Mittwoch, 27. Februar 2008, Will Stephenson wrote:
> > Also, does no one else care, have an option, have a preference, or think
> > this is an issue?  So far this has been a discussion between three
> > people, a developer, and artist, and a designer (that sounds like the
> > beginning of a bad bar joke).
>
> Ok, you've given me license to stick my oar in.  I believe it should be
> full width, because

Back in the days, when Aaron put up some videos of the different alternatives 
that could be used to mark the selected item in kickoff, I noticed that the 
rectangle is not the best mediator for selected and could as well be removed. 
Sounds funny, but bare with me.

The rectangle tries to tell the user which item in kickoff became active due 
to hovering with the mouse-cursor. It points to the selected item so to say, 
the item itself does not change state.

However, to me it seemed very passive compared to "active" selecting, i.e. the 
item itself telling "me, me, I'm selected". To mediate this one needs the 
item to change status. While this is easy for the text, i.e. make it bold, it 
is not for the icon, because currently there are only two stati available, 
i.e. blured and not blured. Yet having a blured icon decreases the usability 
when the user wants to find something. So there needs to be another status, 
e.g. colour, position or size that changes when selected.

So if the icon could become bigger when selected, just a tiny bit and the text 
becomes bold the item could wave at the user and say: "Hello, I'm selected!".

I did not think this works until I saw the videos comparing those methods. 
However the one with the bold text did unfortunately use blured or greyed out 
icons, so it was not completely satisfying.

Sven