Re: [Nautilus-list] Oh no, more feature requests!!

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> On 25Jul2001 04:31PM (-0700), Ben FrantzDale wrote:
> > On 25 Jul 2001 17:49:45 -0300, Juliano Soares dos Santos wrote:

> > > 3) Change zoom widget on the toolbar
> > > Take a look at: http://www.eps.ufsc.br/~juliano/nautilus/zoom.png
> > > Again this is just to make navigation faster. For example, I'm in the
> > > default view (100%) and I want to zoom to 400%. I need to pass to 150%, then
> > > to 200% and finally to 400%. With the widget change I can pass directly from
> > > 100 to 400%.
> >
> > Tried right clicking on it? (Though I agree that a standard widget would
> > be good.)
> 
> The zoom control does have some usability issues (particularly the
> fact that the menu is a bit undiscoverable, but I'm not totally sure
> this is the best replacement. Do any UI experts have good ideas?

For my money, Juliano's idea is just fine, provided you only want to
provide preset zoom values.  Unless it's being proposed it as a new
standard widget, the custom magnifying glass/+/- control thing is just
one more control for people to learn for no particularly good reason,
and one more thing for the Nautilus engineers to have to make accessible
when they port to gtk2.0.  Whereas a standard gtk menu button control
will give you accessibility for free, plus if the user has seen one
before, they'll know exactly what it will do just by looking at it.

If you want to allow custom zoom levels that the user can type in,
something like the dropdown combo in M$ Word is probably more like what
you want, or perhaps even a spin box (although it would be a slightly
odd spinbox since the interval wouldn't be the same each time you hit
the up/down arrows, so maybe that's a bad idea).  Either of those
controls would give you accessibility for free, too.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems