Re: [Deskbar] A couple suggestions

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2007/2/13, David Prieto <frandavid100 gmail com>:

> Why would alt-f3 show the history?

In order to make access to all of deskbar's functionalities easy, be it
from the keyboard or from the mouse.

Are you using the mouse? You just have to click the deskbar icon & then
the history item of choice, or start typing right away. Are you using
the keyboard? you just have to press Alt+F3 and start typing (to perform
a search) or press up / down to access history items.

As far as I know, right now we don't have an easy way to access history
items without using the mouse.

Actually there is a masterly undiscoverable feature... If the entry is empty you *can* hit up/down and cycle through history items. You just can't see the list.

> I can see that with your ideas it doesn't do any obvious harm, except
> that I find it confusing, which is why I'm a bit against the idea.

I'm not sure why it would be confusing... it would mean that deskbar
would behave the same either you access it from the keyboard or the
mouse. Right now clicking the icon results in one action, clicking the
text field another and pressing Alt+F3 yet a different one. That is more
confusing IMHO.

> Sebastian: Beware - this is extremely tricky. You have to pass input
> focus back and forth between the history popup and the entry in a
> sensible way. This is basically one of the big main targets of the
> entire cuemiac codebase. It's really tricky to get right.

As I see it -from the user's point of view, I'm afraid I lack any
technical knowledge- either clicking the icon or pressing Alt+F3 would
have the following result:

1 -The history popup is shown, but you get a blinking cursor on the text
field.

2 -You can navigate the history with the up / down arrows, but you can
still enter text at any given moment.

3 - As soon as you enter any text, the history is replaced with the
search results.

4 - You can press Esc. anytime to go back to 1.

I hope I made the idea clear enough. Thanks for taking the time to read
it, and hope you like it!

I'm not totally against the idea. To me it just feels counter intuitive to start typing if there already is a visible menu popped up as a response to my click.

Perhaps if the "secret" feature I mention above could be made more visible... That could be a compromise?


Cheers,
Mikkel