Joshua,

>
> Improving control over resizing happens to be one of my current
mini-projects;
> the current reliance of a single halo handle that can only resize at the
bottom
> right corner is getting in the way of my integration of Cassowary into
Morphic.
>

Any ideas on how you are going to achieve this?

>
> I don't know exactly what you're talking about here.  You click on it to
pick
> it up, and release the same click to drop it.  A quick click has the
effect of
> raising the morph to the top.  What is the second click you are talking
about?
>

My bad.

I *really* meant to say ;-) that when you click on a morph, it exhibits the
unintended side effect of moving the morph (for me this is around 25% of the
time).

Here's what happens:

Click on morph to 'raise' : ( on a large morph nothing appears to happen for
a beat so user doesn't release mouse button immediately)
Hand caches morph and draws shadow around morph
User sees something has happened and releases the mouse button.
(  depending on a lot of factors, sometimes the mouse has moved before the
button has been released )
The morph is redrawn in the world ( without shadow ).

I think here that when a morph is in the background, I am only clicking to
select it. In regular use, I don't try to pick up something in the
background and move it one fell swoop. Most of the time I just want to bring
it to the top (and need a little bit of leeway even then), and I do not want
it to move upon selection.

> >
> > Here's a case where I think command-click-drag is a better metaphor than
> > click-to-pickup, though in practice right now it's impractical because
the
> > command-click brings up the halos and causes the drag time to slow
> > considerably.
>
> Yes, although this problem will eventually go away with faster CPUs and
> hardware acceleration of 2D graphics.
>

I would guess that my Pentium IV is a factor of four off, so it would appear
to be 2 to three years before this would iron itself out. Hardware assist on
the graphics side is tough for other reasons (portability between the main
platforms being number 1).

I would make the case that you don't want the halos up when you move a
morph. It gives a false impression as to the real size of a morph, and gets
confusing when you reach the sides of the screen when the halos start
bumping them. For the black and brown handles, they hide the other halos
when they start moving things around.

Jim