I was wondering whether it's better to write individual replies or a large one, as you can see I've decided to write a long to all most of the above posts.
The cursor left / right always works on all sliders, this is Windows standard behaviour. In the Alpha the problem is that focus is in the edittext field, this is why the cursor keys don't work. And this cannot be changed since you need the cursor keys for editing. Perhaps cursor up/down would be good and also intuitive when using spinbuttons.
- Focus on slider
To make the slider work properly, the slider should have focus when opening the dialog. Then, the cursor left/right will and the mouse wheel will work, again.
- Sliders with two buttons
Dreamer wrote:[ << ] [ < ] [----------+----------] [ > ] [ >> ]
I think the slider with two buttons on each side is not a good idea. This is not a standard control and if possible we should stick to the standard controls, unless we all find the new control absolutely necessary, intuitive to use, and applicable in various szenarios.
As you know, sliders already handle coarse and fine adjusting: When dragging the slider thumb, you have very coarse steps, when using the arrow buttons, it's single steps.
- 0.01 precision
Lesmo16 wrote:About which sizes of pictures are we talking here - poster sizes?
If we're talking about common picture sizes, even rotations about full degrees are quite unrecognizable.
So for what do we need the rotating precision of tenths or even hundredths degrees?
Very true. The 0.01 degrees are possibly needed in very, very rare cases, only. If it affects usability too much, we should even change precision to 0.1. In the edittext field it should not harm too much.
For usability we should focus on the most common cases, which is steps in 1.0 degree steps. So slider should be 1 degree or even coarser.
- Reset button
Difficult to say whether we need a reset button or not. At the moment we have it on most effect/filter dialogs, so it's more or less a standard on XnView dialogs.
Perhaps there is other ways to provide the "0", e.g. a dropdownlist could contain standard angles -135, -90, -45, 0, +45, +90, +135, +180 and/or recently used angles.
- Toolbar buttons for Reset and Previous values
marsh wrote:A reset button could be a tiny iconic button "[0]", next to input box, instead of a large button.
Good idea. To be honest, since the 1st day that I've been using XnView I have been thinking that the buttons "Zero" and Previous are quite confusing: They are far too large for what they do. And the labels "Zero" and "Previous" are not very meaningful either. Using small toolbar buttons with a good symbol is a good idea and adequate. And a tooltip with a clear explanation will make sure that people still know what these buttons do. And these toolbar buttons can be applied on all dialogs and user will recognize and understand them.
- Minor: -180 and +180
On the slider there should be a signs on both numbers "-180" and "+180".
I actually like marsh's dialog "Example 2", it's small and clear. Only the doubled arrow buttons on the slider is not so good (see above). And the edittext could have spinbuttons and/or a dropdownlist.
See also discussions
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Rotate dialog: Drop down list for standard angles.
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Rotate image in 0.1 or 0.01 degree increment
KR
marsh
