Am 31.10.2013 17:51, schrieb Charles McNulty:
On 2013-10-31 10:05, Michael Heydekamp wrote:
Hmm... I think it's a pretty good idea to have the facility to select messages with the space bar, but I'd rather suggest to do it the same way as elder guys like me ;) got used to for ages with Norton/Total Commander: Just pressing the space bar without Ctrl or anything else.
If you can find someone to write a Norton Commander skin, I'll write the javascript to match the keyboard behavior! Of course then we'll have to model Pine/Alpine keyboard behavior just to be fair. :)
I did never use Pine/Alpine, how do they handle the space bar?
At least all pieces of software which I'm aware of that did/do support selection with a space bar at all, such as...
- Novell NetWare (e.g. salvage)
- Norton Commander
- Total Commander
- CrossPoint/FreeXP ;)
- WinSCP
- and many more which I currently don't recall
...just require the space bar to be pressed, without Ctrl or anything else.
Of course there might be slightly more Outlook/Thunderbird users than Commander users. :)
Probably, yes. Although Total Commander (note that I'm not talking about Norton Commander only) has a huge user base, WinSCP most likely as well.
But that's not the point: The point is that the majority of people getting the idea to select something with the space bar at all, are from my point of view more familiar with space bar only rather than with ctrl+space.
Or to phrase it different: How many Outlook users, do you think, would even get the slightest idea to select anything with the space bar...? They're lost without a mouse anyway! ;)
And again (as I also do neither use Outlook nor Thunderbird): How do they handle that?
Personally I think if we just take the existing "selected" style and, make a (much) lighter version of it for when it's focused, and a (slightly) darker version for when it's both selected and focused, we'd be good.
Here I suggest to just change the color of the font for any selected message (again, as in Norton/Total Commander) rather than working with three different row colors. This also would solve the problem which row has the focus.
That might be good too. I'll admit I'm not a design person, so I'm not the most qualified person to decide on what the best style would be to show focused records. I like the idea of a dotted outline, but it just doesn't work in IE at all.
Then font color is even more the right way to go, IMO.
Cheers,
Michael Heydekamp Co-Admin freexp.de Düsseldorf/Germany