Re: Panel menu [was Re: [Usability] 'Capplets' ]

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
...

> Before doing really obtrusive stuff, what if we just had a keybinding
> that popped up the right-click menu on the currently focused panel,
> even if a panel child has focus. So then you can get the right click
> without focusing the panel.
> 
> i.e. a keybinding similar to Alt+space on normal windows (that
> opens the window menu in Windows/Metacity).

OK, that sounds OK, except that it's "yet another" magic keybinding...
If we just insisted that F10 was reserved for the panel menu and applets
couldn't grab it, that's be fine, since we already use F10 for menus.

> > I would however lobby for prelighting panel children (i.e. launchers
> > and, if possible, applets) rather than just drawing a focus rectangle,
> > much as the GNOME1.4 panel did, to enhance the visibility of the
> > panel focus indication.
> 
> I still don't understand why we are making panel focus indication
> inconsistent with other focus indication.

Well, PRELIGHT would be consistent with menu items, and what
toolbar items do when mouseover occurs.  One may question why
mouseover and keynav do the "same" thing visually for menus
but not toolbars (once we allow toolbar keynav).  But I 
am all for consistency; just seems that we already overload the
"PRELIGHT" semantics in some contexts.

> The launchers are clearly buttons; they should draw focus like
> buttons. Otherwise it confuses everyone. I can sort of see doing the
> whole panel differently (not really, but sort of), but doing the
> buttons differently seems gratuitous. If button focus indicators are
> invisible, let's make the line wider or something. (Didn't we already
> make this possible in themes?)

Yes, we can make the focus line thicker.  That leaves the problem of
near-versus-far context, which Calum previously pointed out; for
windows, you have a window border narrowing the field, as it were.
We don't have that for panels.

> Trying Windows XP, they display start menu focus as a nearly invisible
> 1-pixel focus outline, and then if you tab to a tasklist button they
> use prelight for it. So their indication is a) invisible and b)
> inconsistent for two buttons that are right next to each other - I
> think we should not copy either of those things.

Agreed, let us not copy features which are already poor in usability ;-)

> Anyway, the fundamental question I have is if focus indication isn't
> visible why don't we make it visible, instead of trying to use
> something else inconsistent to mean focus.

Why did we use prelight in 1.4?  Do we think that was a mistake?  I
think that if we allow prelight in 2.0 launchers when using the mouse,
it's not a consistency problem to use it for keynav as well (though
I think we could keep the focus rectangle as well, for
launchers and applets which didn't respond visually to the PRELIGHT
state).

-Bill

> Havoc