#14277: Shortcuts: Improve interface
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Reporter: Janus | Owner: leavengood
Type: enhancement | Status: assigned
Priority: normal | Milestone: Unscheduled
Component: Preferences/Shortcuts | Version: R1/Development
Resolution: | Keywords:
Blocked By: | Blocking:
Has a Patch: 0 | Platform: All
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Comment (by pulkomandy):
There is a new Input preferences in the work that will eventually include
all of this.
Some thoughts on the matters for shortcuts:
I don't like the idea of "standard actions". This is special-casing some
actions and the underlying reason, is that no one is going to manually
fiddle with "send message" if it is just a textfiled to fill in manually.
So it is essentially already building a workaround for an otherwise bad
user interface.
We can be more ambitious here. That is the whole point of the scripting
interface and the "getsuites" message used to discover what an application
can do. It should be possible to ask an application "what can you do?" and
have the results exposed in the UI. With this in mind, the media_server
should reply with something like:
Available actions:
- Set the volume (to some value)
- Mute
- Raise the volume
- Lower the volume
The Shortcuts prefs should parse the getsuites reply and expose these
possible actions in its UI. Not just a "send message" textfield.
So, how this would work from the user side:
* Send message to [Popup menu]...
- In the popup, common/recently used applications and a "browse" entry for
extra apps
- After selecting the app, Shortcuts asks said application what it knows
to do, and builds an user interface offering the possible actions to
select from, and fields to fill in the parameters. It allows to explore
the available targets in the applications (windows, views, etc) in case
these expose specific interfaces, and a shortcut can be set to one
specific target there.
---
I don't like the idea of "mouse actions". Let's use scripting, we can
invoke buttons directly and this can be done just fine through the "Send
Message" system described above.
---
And one UI complain: I think the textfield/browse UI is a bad idea. No one
is going to edit application paths manually. This UI pattern comes from
lazy programmers using a textfield for a path, then users complaining that
the UI is not good, then the programmer going "gran, okay, I'll add a
browse button".
Please use a popup menu as done in the Background preferences, which
allows quick access to known values and opening a filepanel if needed.
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Ticket URL: <https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/14277#comment:12>
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