[Cuis-dev] highlighting list items under the pointer

[Phil B]

Sorry about my confusing responses as I gave a bit of a stream of
consciousness response which intermingled a couple of thoughts:

1) That transient mouseover highlighting should look distinctly different
from more persistent highlighting (i.e. selection) and other types of
transient highlighting (i.e. keyboard focus.)  I *thought* that the
PluggableButtonMorph would be a good example but...

2) Then I noticed that mouseover highlighting in MenuMorph is different
than PluggableButtonMorph.  So here I'm really complaining about the
inconsistency in the image, not just your proposal.

Liveness in the UI on mouseover is great if it usefully conveys the
information of 'hey, you're over this element'.  But I don't think that can
effectively be done without a consistent, distinctive visual style to it.
(i.e. could you take a screenshot without the mouse pointer visible and
easily distinguish between what is selected and what is a mouseover
highlight?)  If we went with your prototype as-is, we'd have at least three
different styles to convey the same information: mouseover a button,
mouseover a listitem and mouseover a menuitem.

On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 11:31 PM Luciano Notarfrancesco <luchiano at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Phil,
> Thanks for trying it.
> The most obvious difference I see with what PluggableButtonMorph does is
> the choice of color for highlighting, but that also depends on the theme.
> Notice that highlighting and selection are different things, and right now
> highlighting is not used much except to give user immediate feedback in
> case the model takes a while to update. In Cuis default theme the highlight
> color seems inadequate tho, it should be less salient than the actual
> selection color, but it looks good in a dark theme. You're suggesting
> matching the colors for list item highlighting with button mouseOver
> highlighting? Perhaps that would make sense even without the changes I
> made, or perhaps should be made more configurable in the theme, right now
> the selected row uses 'Theme current listHighlightFocused: owner
> hasKeyabordFocus' and highlighted row used the same but 'duller', perhaps
> we should add a 'listSelectionFocused:' differentiate them in the theme.
> What I did doesn't seem to interfere with keyboard selection. I see it
> disappears when using the keyboard, and I see the original keyboard
> selection behavior, do you see other problems? We seem to lose the
> immediate feedback on click, tho, because the item is already highlighted
> when you click, but still the new behavior seems more lively...
>
> On Sat, May 25, 2019 at 2:38 AM Phil B <pbpublist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Luciano,
>>
>> Interesting idea but I'd suggest a different approach.  See how
>> PluggableButtonMorph does it via #mouseEnter:, #mouseLeave: and
>> #drawRoundGradientLookOn:.  If for whatever reason you don't want to match
>> the style of button mouseover, you probably should use a different visual
>> indicator than what is used currently for keyboard focus / selection so
>> it's clear to the user *what* you're indicating.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Phil
>>
>> On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 3:24 PM Luciano Notarfrancesco via Cuis-dev <
>> cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, this is more like it, but still not sure if this is the intended use
>>> of highlightedRow, let me know.
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 7:05 PM Luciano Notarfrancesco <
>>> luchiano at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hm, I just tested it with the default Cuis theme and it is weird
>>>> because it keeps the item highlighted after the pointer leaves the list,
>>>> seems confusing... didn't notice it with my theme because I use black
>>>> background. This needs a little more thought, sorry..
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 6:55 PM Luciano Notarfrancesco <
>>>> luchiano at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The other day I looked at Squeak and saw how the PluggableListMorph
>>>>> highlights the item under the mouse pointer. I don't remember paying
>>>>> attention to it before, but it seems pretty common, I'm seeing it now in
>>>>> gmail for example. This changeset adds a line of code to do that, let me
>>>>> know if you like it or if it's annoying.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>> Cuis-dev mailing list
>>> Cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st
>>> https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/listinfo/cuis-dev
>>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/attachments/20190525/86f22e52/attachment-0001.html>