Wednesday, May 2, 2012

internal representation of actions in the desktop and shell

When looking through the source code for KDE, I saw actions like on click.

I was looking for a way to solve the bug where the system settings panel uses the same settings as files.    The system settings page is basically a web page, where single click is expected, but some idiot decided to punish people for setting double click as their preferred interaction method.

This got me thinking about how to represent interactions with the user, so that programmers are not confused by click.

This is also relevant for touch screens.


I would organize actions by how explicit/deliberate of a request they require.,  so that they could be adjusted by a system setting, and still

onpassiveInquery --    mouseover
oninquery -- righclick
onprobe -- single click
ondoacton --doubleclick
onexplicit action -- double click plus dialog or other interactive confirmation
ondangerousexplicit action -- require a captcha to be typed in
onsystempermission -- requrie sudo level...  (this may still be separete.


This would allow us to design interfaces for multiple types of interaction, and swap the code for the interaction based on what type of device it is.

No comments: