[kepler-dev] Bring to Front vs Move to first menu choice

[Laura L. Downey]

The common commands for ordering overlapping objects in many graphics
programs are:

Bring to Front
Send to Back
Bring Forward
Send Backward

So I would recommend those.

And yes, I would recommend that the commands (whatever they are), are
phrased the same in the main menu and the right click (context) menus.
(Was that too polite? ;-) )

I don't know if I quite understand the issue you described about the
ordering of parameters in the config dialog.  So you are saying that the
parameters are listed bottom up as first to last?  But even so, I don't
think that will cause a huge usability issue other than the few users that
notice the order is reversed from what they might have expected.  The order
of the parameters as listed has no inherent meaning does it?  And if not,
then the most important thing is just that all the parameters are there for
adjustment if desired.  In fact one way to do things would be just to
alphabetize the parameters, which is a standard expectation of things in
lists.

Laura L. Downey
Senior Usability Engineer
LTER Network Office
Department of Biology, MSC03 2020
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM  87131-0001
505.277.3157 phone
505.277-2541 fax
ldowney at lternet.edu
 

-----Original Message-----
From: kepler-dev-bounces at ecoinformatics.org
[mailto:kepler-dev-bounces at ecoinformatics.org] On Behalf Of Edward A. Lee
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 9:39 PM
To: Christopher Brooks
Cc: ptresearch at chess.eecs.berkeley.edu; kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org
Subject: Re: [kepler-dev] Bring to Front vs Move to first menu choice


Oops... These menus should have the same labels (the menu bar menu and
the context menu).  I just checked, and they both do the same thing,
and the Ctrl-F and Ctrl-B bindings work.  To check this, create decorative
objects in a Vergil screen (graphical elements like rectangles, text, etc.)
and the select them and select Ctrl-F or Ctrl-B.

For the record, "Send to Back" seems more user friendly, but
"Move to first(back)" is more technically correct.  The fact is,
you can invoke these commands on any attribute, and it will affect not
just how they are rendered, but also in what order they appear when
you edit the parameters of the container...

I agree with what Laura will inevitably think (but is probably too
polite to say :-) that this is pretty confusing... But it will also be
confusing if one chooses "Send to Back" on a parameter, and it has
the side effect of putting it first in the Configure dialog...
I don't have a good answer here...  Perhaps we should just go with
"Send to Back" and hope nobody notices :-)

Note that I recently made it so decorative elements (which are just
attributes with icons) would appear behind or ahead of objects
of an entirely different type (e.g., text can be put behind or in front of
an actor). This didn't used to be the case...

Edward

At 12:33 PM 12/19/2005 -0800, Christopher Brooks wrote:
>Edward writes:
> >    Note that I would not use Ctrl+F for Full Screen...
> >    It is currently bound to "bring to front", which is a fairly common
> >    choice in graphics software, and is far more commonly needed than
> >    Full Screen.
>
>Ok, this is a little confusing.
>
>What we have now is the Edit menu (above the toolbar) has
>Send to Back   (Ctrl+B)
>Bring to Front (Ctrl+F)
>(These are defined in vergil/basic/BasicGraphFrame.java)
>
>The context menu for an actor has
>Move to first(back)
>Move to last(front)
>(These are defined in vergil/kernel/AttributeController.java)
>
>It seems to me that these are one and the same, but I guess they are
>not?  How are these different?
>
>What got me started was I was expecting "Move to first (back)" to have
>a Ctrl+F shortcut, but it did not.
>
>Is there any way we can combine something here?
>
>_Christopher
>

------------
Edward A. Lee
Professor, Chair of the EE Division, Associate Chair of EECS
231 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
phone: 510-642-0253 or 510-642-0455, fax: 510-642-2845
eal at eecs.Berkeley.EDU, http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/~eal  

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