The Deity tree widget
Ok! I've now _finally_ seen the current tree widget!
I hate to say it, but unfortunately it bears very little resemblance to
what I was hoping for. There are 4 areas in which I would like to see
changes:
1) Collapsible listes lines
2) Collapsible list controls
3) action bitmaps
4) radio buttons and checkboxes
1) What I was hoping for was a collapsible tree widget (not unlike what
linux eplorer uses, but using the little triangle controls from the
MacOS). The little lines between the open/close bitmaps show the
relationships bewteen different lines very clearly. For an example of
these lines checkout:
http://jungfrau.ptf.hro.nl/explorer/
2) If you look in the currently available UI spec you will notice that
the bitmap infront of each item in the tree is also potentially
different. There is a different triangle to represent whether the list
will expand a group heading into a list of packages, or whether you are
expanding a list of dependencies. (one triangle is currently grey, and
the other has a red dot in it. These precise bitmaps need not be used
in the final product, but it is importants to make the distinction in
what part of the list you are about to expand.
3) There is a little bitmap infront of the "inst-version" number that at
a glance tells the user whether it is an upgrade, downgrade, new
package, obsolete, or no package is being offered for installation.
- For an upgrade there should be a little green up arrow
- For a downgrade there should be a little red down arrow
- For a new package there should be a little new graphic
- For an obsolete package there should be a little "x" (or something
like that)
- For a package which is already installed there should be nothing in
this column (not even a version number)
4) The left three columns should consist of radio buttons and checkboxes
(depending on what the row represents. It is important that these
controls are very obviously either a radio button group or a single
checkbox. This is because not all options are available in each
situation. Having a single kind of check control is not satisfactory
for this design.
- For an upgrade there are 3 radio buttons (del, keep, inst)
- For a downgrade there are 3 radio buttons (del, keep, inst)
- For a new package there is one checkbox (inst)
- For an obsolete package there is one checkbox (del)
- For a package which is already installed there is one checkbox (del)
(NOTE: This is a bit different from the currently pushlished spec. You
unintentionally pointed out a flaw in my "hold" logic which has
necesitated a few minor changes)
My preference is for radio buttons to be round and checkboxes to be
square, as this is the way they look for most widget sets and people
understand these shapes and what they do already.
I hope I haven't been too harsh in either my tone or wording of the
above...
Thanks,
Behan
--
Behan Webster mailto:behanw@verisim.com
+1-613-224-7547 http://www.verisim.com/
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