Brad Fuller wrote:
Andrew Tween wrote:
Hi Brad, ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad Fuller" brad@bradfuller.com To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 11:46 PM Subject: Re: [ANN] FreeType Plus release
Andrew Tween wrote:
All the menus really need re-working to provide nice scrolling lists.
Hmm, I'd say "to not need to scroll nor page in the first place" :)
:) Do you have any ideas on how that could be done? If, for instance, you had 999 fonts?
A fisheye, everything tiny, until you hover over it view? Or typing the font name to bring up matches?
I'm curious
Could use cascading menus. based on mfr, or type/kind, or even alphabetical
Those are all good ideas.
But, wouldn't scrolling still be needed, at some point? If you had 999 fonts beginning with 'A'. Or, 999 Sans Serif fonts.
Chances are that's not going to be. But, i see your point.
Or maybe, not that many fonts, but a small screen resolution (640x480).
Yeah, if there are 999 fonts, then no matter what you do, there is either going to be some screen real estate used up or that energy is going to be placed into the user finagling around to browse and select. A neat problem which I don't know how to solve.
Some alternative ideas:
- Category Based:
- Cascading Lists: (http://designinginterfaces.com/Cascading_Lists)
- Closable Panels (http://designinginterfaces.com/Closable_Panels)
(which is similar to the tree-table)
- Helpful navigation builtin to the selection:
*Alternative Selection:
- Create a "My Fonts" selection that contains either the fonts the user
has selected recently, or ones that he selected manually to be in the My Fonts set.
- Show All - I've seen menus where ALL the font names are shown. Takes
up the whole freakin' screen. Scary, but you see them all.
Oh.. forgot to add the obvious: change page dn/up to arrows above and below the menu. Hover over either and it automatically scrolls in that direction. That would at least make it easier for people to browse. The problem, I think, is it takes a while to render the next "set" of font names. Right? Seems so on my system (which is slow with a lot of fonts.) So, you could have the rendered list before the request.