Re: Dasher 3.2.0 released

[Matthew Garrett <mjg59-gap srcf ucam org>]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 03:27:16PM -0800, Peter Korn wrote:

>  1. There seem to be multiple sets of empty boxes I need to navigate
>     through to get to the menus in gedit - perhaps some of the code
>     in GOK could be helpful here?

That's now sorted.

>  3. The control box/alphabet is practically buried within the rest of
>     the alphabet.  At least for two dimensional Dasher use, would you
>     consider putting that on the top or bottom (vertical vs. horizontal),
>     for rapid access?  It also suggests a kind of "escape" to do something
>     completely different from entering text to put it in a different 
>     place in the Dasher display.

It's a nice idea, but it's not currently desperately practical - as the 
user zooms into boxes, the older boxes continue to exist. It's a valid 
input to enter, say, an "a" and then realise that you wanted the "e" 
below it - the direct route would then be through the bottom of the "a".

>  2. Once I opened the Open File dialog, Dasher didn't give me access
>     to the UI elements - again perhaps GOK code could be used for
>     this?
> 
>  4. The Menus alphabet always showed me first a set of running 
>     applications to choose between before I could get to the menus
>     of the app I was interacting with.  Since most of the time I'm
>     going to want to interact with the menus of the application I'm
>     also entering text into, please consider having menus be for the
>     topmost application's menus, and put at the top level of Control
>     an option to switch to a different application (again, rather
>     like GOK).

Both of these are marginally awkward - if a new window appears, or if 
the user focus changes (or, indeed, even if we just change the order of 
the menus) then we have to invalidate the current tree and build a new 
one. In itself that's not too difficult, but it may lead to some 
confusion on the part of the user if Dasher resets itself every time a 
window pops up. It's arguably the correct way of doing it, though. I'll 
look into it.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 srcf ucam org