7
Nov
In a small poll (or sorta), Albert asks what kind of values are better in the zoom combobox for oKular.
IMO, zoom is best represented by either:
- a slider with major ticks in almost logarithmic scale, going from 10% to (wishful thinking) 10000%, with a spinbox or constrained textedit next to it to show the slider value and allow manual editing
- a zoom out button and a zoom in button (with the classical icons and obeying bidirectional gui guidelines) with a constrained textedit inbetween. Once again, zoom buttons should increase/decrease zoom value almost logarithmically (1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000% etc.)
IN order for these widgets to take lesser space on toolbars, they can be actually hidden and popped up from an unique zoom button ("lens" icon). AmiPro was doing this stuff perfectly 15 years ago.
BTW, such a zoom widget should go in kdelibs and be strongly recommended by the programming guidelines.
Comboboxes are a poor choice (aesthetically and usability wise) for zoom widgets.
- cristian tibirna's blog
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Start using sliders, start using sliders, start using sliders...
..and I'll add: put them on the status bar, thus saving your toolbar space that is expensive _now_ in KDE4 ;)
Good idea indeed
zoom is AAMOF a status information.
could you explain what you
could you explain what you mean by
In order for these widgets to take lesser space on toolbars, they can be actually hidden and popped up from an unique zoom button ("lens" icon). AmiPro was doing this stuff perfectly 15 years ago.
you say you want one icon, which pops up the current three widgets, (2 +/- icons and a drop-down)??? it would require more point&clicks, or did amipro have a solution for that? maybe a screenshot? i can't find any...
more clicks
In AmiPro it required indeed at least 2 clicks. But we have modern toolkits now and we know how to do "on mouse hover" events. No screenshots. 15 years ago people didn't yet develop the acute apprehension for screenshots that we get today ;-)
"increase/decrease zoom
"increase/decrease zoom value almost logarithmically (1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000% etc.)"
Isn't that rather called "exponentially"?
(I know the logarithmic is the inverted exponential function, so it's close anyway...)
Logarithmic
The QSlider has to be given equally distant intervals as major ticks. If these intervals are the logarithms of the percentage (10,100,1000 etc.) you get 1,2,3 etc as values.
loga & expo
Ah, I see.
I thought of "on each equal distance tick, mark percentage value as vertical height" -- and I got an expo function graph :-)
Guess that's what flows from the "inverse function" thingie. :-)