Re: [GNUe-dev] Intuitive behaviour in Forms

[chafar]

Hello.

First of all, be aware that I've not used forms enough to have a whole
idea about what I would change about their UI behavior.

El jue, jul 15, a las 12:38:03 Reinhard Mueller escribía:
> 
> * When an entry receives the focus, the whole text in the entry should
> become selected.

It would be good 'per se'. In addition, it would do more clear what
field has the focus, that's one of the problems I've found (this could
be an issue of wx driver). But, still, I think it would be wonderful to
find a way to mark very very very well the field with the focus, because
in complex forms, the field with the focus says what will happen when
you press some keys.

> 
> * Personally, I regard it as quite unintuitive that cursor keys navigate
> through the records. A more intuitive reaction to cursor-up and
> cursor-down could be:
> 1. if the focus is in a multi-line entry, and we aren't at the
> first/last line, move a single line up/down.
> 2. otherwise, if the focus is in a widget with more than one row, and we
> aren't in the first/last record, move a row (= a record) up/down
> 3. otherwise, move one entry up/down

And how would you make rows 'scroll' a record forward or backwards? I
would expect that if I'm in the last row and press the down arrow it
will 'scroll' one record, so, still in the last row, I have the next
record in it.

> ...

May be another issue I've seen in forms helps with this stuff: I've
always made a clear distinction between navigating and editing,
defaulting always to navigation. I've found very ugly that when I
acquire a record I'm already editing it; it should be needed a clear
action to enter editing mode: a keystroke is not so much work, and you
feel much more comfortable.

An additional benefit is that control keys can have different meaning
when you are in each mode. This is very important, because navigating,
then, can be very much improved.

Reviewing info is a common task, and it mixes finding, watching and
editing; the ways you find info in forms could be improved: You should
be able to query for a invoice record and when you got it, still
navigating, change the focus to, say, the date field, press the next key
to get the next invoice by date, press the edit key to change something
in it, press the save-and-exit-editing key, change the focus to customer
field, press de next key and obtain the next invoice of that customer,
again the editing -> save-and-exit-editing, and follow the navigation.

I don't know what difficult involves a thing such that, but my customers
always have found very useful easily navigating their info while being
able to editing the piece they want with just a neat keystroke.

I've would like to offer a much more defined envision; I was waiting to
know much better forms architecture and behaviour to do it, but Reinhard
has thrown the issue...

greetings for all.
-- 
José Esteban
Granada - Spain
http://alcances.net