[haiku-bugs] [Haiku] #8883: Text inputs don't follow Haiku "live update" UI paradigm.
- From: "jstressman" <trac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2012 11:29:10 -0000
#8883: Text inputs don't follow Haiku "live update" UI paradigm.
----------------------------+------------------------------
Reporter: jstressman | Owner: stippi
Type: bug | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: R1
Component: User Interface | Version: R1/Development
Keywords: | Blocked By:
Blocking: | Has a Patch: 0
Platform: All |
----------------------------+------------------------------
This appears to be related to the same issue being discussed in #3123 but
I'm opening this as a new ticket because that one is 4 years old, denies
the problem, and says it's just Playground specific when I don't believe
it is. This seems to be a fundamental design problem that is affecting
multiple applications and parts of the OS.
An easy way to reproduce this is to open the Backgrounds preferences and
choose to manually place your background.
Change one of the X Y coordinate numbers and nothing will happen until you
change focus to somewhere else (by hitting TAB or clicking in another
input box etc). Only then will the Apply button become available. In fact,
using ENTER to make your change "live" is even worse, as for me it applies
the first change to by making the Apply button active for a split second
and then activating it... when it wasn't active... and then subsequent
changes DON'T work with ENTER... or even tabbing to change focus... so you
end up having to click around and type different numbers in etc to get it
working again... it's a mess.
This is a systematic problem that affects other applications as well.
Icon-O-Matic for instance is doubly affected by this in the color
switcher... when entering a hex color the color isn't changed until you
change focus... and if you're changing to one of the RGB numbers to get
the HEX color to register, the RGB number you switched focus to ALSO won't
change until you change focus from THAT one as well... so it takes 2 focus
changes to actually have everything display correctly.
The correct behavior would apparently be to announce the change as soon as
it happens and make the appropriate updates per keystroke or whatever. So
as soon as you change the number, the option to Apply it becomes available
(and the location in the preview image changes etc), or in the Color
Picker the updated color and correct related numeric value fields would be
shown, etc... perhaps after a tiny time out so that unnecessary processing
isn't done that jams things up.
Is there some reason why the default behavior should be this unintuitive
across the board, leading to further problems in many places like this? It
would seem like the default behavior should be a "live update", and only
in special cases would you want to manually force an update by making the
user do extra work.
The only cases where I can see a user NOT wanting to see a live update of
their changes is something where it would be very CPU intensive to
recalculate something based on those changes. And for something like that
it would seem better to make that the case where the programmer would need
to say "DON'T live update this" rather than a default live update
behavior.
All this seems even more the case considering that the rest of the OS UI
seems focused on a paradigm of live updating without requiring extra work
to apply changes etc. Correct? That makes this behavior really unintuitive
from my perspective and in conflict with the rest of expected UI function
of the OS.
BUT... I'm not a programmer, so take that as you will... but having to do
all this focus changing throughout Haiku to work around this problem is
unintuitive and unpleasant from a user perspective, and apparently is just
as unintuitive for other programmers because it seems so overlooked and
problematic at the moment.
hrev44524 gcc2h
--
Ticket URL: <http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/8883>
Haiku <http://dev.haiku-os.org>
Haiku - the operating system.
Other related posts:
