Auto-hiding panels

[Andrew Lake]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 6:51 AM, Àlex Fiestas wrote:

> On Tuesday 14 October 2014 10:43:42 Martin Klapetek wrote:
> > I'd like to change this for Plasma panels to not have any resistance or
> > very minimal one, basically get it into a state that slamming the mouse
> > against a screen edge will show the panel easily, without requiring an
> > additional push.
> I think we should ask VDG about this, it is a change in behavior and look
> and
> feel after all!
>
> Maybe just tweak to the edge triggering code might get us there as Martin
suggests. :-)

Best I can tell, the behavioral model from the user side is to move the
cursor far enough beyond the edge and the panel will appear. Based on that
behavioral model, I think the expectation would be that if the cursor is
moving relatively quickly when it get's to the edge it'll get to the magic
distance beyond the edge more quickly than if the cursor is moving
relatively slowly.

Another potential behavioral model could be a force model, where the panel
unhides when the edge is hit with a certain degree of "force". Force based
models can be quite complex though since it usually requires some kind of
elastic resistance at the edge to allow triggering when moving the cursor
relatively slowly. Also, since there are very few uses of the cursor within
the screen boundaries that employ a force model, the user needs to maintain
quite different behavioral models of the the cursor behavior at the edge
versus the middle of the screen. It doesn't mean it can't be done, but I
think it can be quite tricky to do well. A simple magic distance past the
edge behavior is usually much simpler and more predictable I think and
should handle the fast versus slow edge approaches just fine.

Hope this helps,
Andrew
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