Re: Impressed

Rob Kendrick wrote:

The "default" button icon type has a yellow channel around it. This
channel is part of the icon, and thus its bounding box. The style
guide says this is the button that is activated when Enter is pressed.

The problem comes when you want to let the Wimp change which icon the
Enter key will activate [...]

You're saying that keyboard navigation would change the border type of a selected button to mimic the default action button since when "Enter" is pressed, the highlighted item (during 2D navigation) would be activated. However there's no reason to attempt to apply the style guide here. It says nothing about 2D navigation, which is an entirely new mode of operation as far as the RISC OS Desktop is concerned and thus requires its own set of rules.

If the Style Guide were updated, one might choose to state that the wider border type is for the "default action button", not specifically the one which gets activated on "Enter" - the two being different if 2D navigation were in use [1]. Meanwhile, I would entirely expect 2D navigation to use a wholly visually different way of indicating the currently selected icon since:

* The range of icon types that must be highlighted is far greater than
action buttons (radio buttons, option buttons, input fields...).

* If one were to highlight an action button and the border type were to
change as suggested with this being the *only* change visually, then
it would be extremely hard to tell just by looking at the window that
2D navigation were active - it would just look like a window with a
possibly rather odd choice of default action.

The last point would be mitigated slightly by the user being aware of their current navigation context but assumes they are not interrupted and that nobody else might use the machine in that state. Basically, it would just be plain old fashioned bad design IMHO.


[1] For example, one might choose to have keypad "Enter" always activate
the default action button just as "Esc" activates the default cancel
button. "Return" activates whatever 2D navigation is highlighting.
Maybe 2D navigation is always active and a window without any user
intervention would make sure that "Return" and "Enter" both applied
to the same control - so it would have both a wide border and the 2D
navigation focus highlight. Or maybe 2D navigation only starts if
the user presses Tab or uses cursor keys on a window with no
tradtionally Tab/cursor navigated input fields, or tries to move off
the notional edges of a set of traditional input fields. Actually,
it seems to me that getting 2D navigation integrated seamlessly with
windows which already use Tab/Cursors to navigate between input
fields is a far more tricky problem than visual highlighting.

--
TTFN, Andrew Hodgkinson
Find some electronic music at: Photos, wallpaper, software and more:
http://pond.org.uk/music.html http://pond.org.uk/
.

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