plasma-mid (Mobile Internet Device)

[Matthias Welwarsky]

On Tuesday, 26. August 2008, Chani wrote:
> On 8/25/08, Benjamin Kleiner <bizzl.greekdog at web.de> wrote:
> > Am Montag 25. August 2008 21:54:53 schrieb Matthias Welwarsky:
> > > Am Montag 25 August 2008 17:50 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> > > > these icons will be big, shiny and happy. i'd also like to offer a
> > > > hover
> > > >
> > > > based interface for them, so you can press, hold briefly, move,
> > > > release
> > > >
> > > > and trigger a non-launch action (such as colour in the "mark as
> > > >
> > > > favourite" star, or maybe things like "hide entry"?)
> > >
> > > gestures are nice but not easily discoverable. maybe just press+hold
> > > and
> > >
> > > then offer some context specific activities in a (shrug) menu-thingy?
> >
> > What about a circular menu, similar to kommando or the circular
> > application menu for gnome?
> >
> > Okay, that would still be a menu, but I think this would be easily
> > accessible with the thumb.
>
> what about corner actions like in dolphin? or would that suck for
> thumbs? ...ohh. those normally show up on hover, and touchscreens
> don't really have hover....
> aaron,were you suggesting they show up on mousedown and then i can
> drag my pointer to one of the corner icons to select it? huh.
> interesting.

I think corner actions are not a good response to a press+hold gesture. Your 
fingers are where you pressed the object. The GUI response to that should be 
near your fingers as well.

There is also a small (maybe neglegible) problem with most (resistive) 
touchscreens: they tend to be nonlinear near the edges, it's difficult to 
have precise coordinates there. It's not usually a problem if active elements 
are big enough. It's just that this is somewhat diametrical to desktop GUI 
design habits, where we tend to have small but important elements to control 
e.g. the size of an application window (ok, maybe not a good example), or the 
button to hide kicker in KDE 3.x

-- 
everyone loves gadgets, until they try to make them