I'm having a sort out of my (Delphi) applications and I been visiting the floating form size and location persistence which seems to be increasingly important with larger screen real-estate and multi-monitors. Clearly it is often desireable to have a user's form reopen in the same place as they closed it, but maybe not always, for example a modal dialog might justify opening bang in front of the users vision, i.e on the primary monitor center screen. There seems to be little out there on the 'net about this and commercial applications seem inconsistent especially regarding multiple monitors. So, a few (probably contravertial!) rules to get us started...
Non-modal forms should always reopen at the size and location of closure.
Modal forms (i.e with OK/cancel, Yes/No buttons) should reopen at the
previous size (if sizeable), but inthe center of the monitor on which the application resides.
An information message box should open in the center of the monitor on which the application resides.
A warning or error dialog should open in the center of the primary monitor.
Thanks in advance,
Brian
"Non-modal forms should always reopen at the size and location of closure."
They must have a default position and size when they first open. Do you have
any rules about this?
I would add the qualifier: If the screen resolution/monitor count is
different from the last time this form was opened, then it reverts to default
position. So no inaccessible forms restored 400 pixels to the right and below
the screen area.
"A warning or error dialog should open in the centre of the primary monitor."
I don't understand why you move the messagebox from 'monitor where the app
resides' (henceforth MWTAR) to the primary monitor. You know the punter is
looking at the MWTAR; after all he has just done something 'bad'. Why are you
changing monitors now you have something important to say?
(After all, if it is an error dialog containing useful diagnostics, he won't
read it anyway. I don't see the need to hide it from him.)
A further thought. One problem with error modal dialogs is that, wherever they pop up, the user may hit 'Enter' accidentally while typing something else and dismiss it. I know I do this quite often.
One trick I have seen to overcome this is to disable the Ok button when the dialog is first displayed. There is a 3 second timer in the dialog which counts down, displaying the time remaining in a small label attached to the button. So the punter knows he will be able to dismiss the thing soon.
Obviously this must be used very, very sparingly, and only on the rarest and most important of dialogs. But it struck me as quite clever. Perhaps all that needs doing is to make Ok the default button after three seconds.
A dialog should never open in the center of the monitor. Consider one of the 30" monitors with 2560 x 1600 pixels resolution - using an application maximized on one of these monitors makes sense only in very specific cases. If an application form resides in one of the corners of that huge screen area then the user would need to move the mouse cursor from its current location to the center of the screen, and back after dismissing the dialog. Also, with a normal viewing distance it's probably impossible to have all of that screen in view at the same time, so center of the active window will be more "in front of the users vision" than the screen center. Any dialog that doesn't remember its position should open centered on its parent window. Exceptions should be made for dialogs that are bigger than their parent window (where it makes sense to leave a bit of the parent visible, which makes it more obvious for the user what's going on), and property pages that should appear near the objects they apply to.
I would also think about saving screen positions in percent of the screen area, not in pixels. This way using a laptop with and without a large external screen will always make optimum use of the screen area - using absolute coordinates will either have portions of the screen unused, or windows moved outside of the visible area.
Depending on the platform, when the application does not have focus when throwing up an alert it should avoid taking focus. Too easy for a user typing to dismiss the alert without any chance to read it.
E.g. on Windows make use of the ability to flash a task bar button.
Related
There is a small window application (50x50px) with only one image inside of it. When you click the image, a popover(GtkPopover) appears, but it cannot overpass the window borders and only part of it is shown.
How could I solve this issue without resizing the window?
Popovers in GTK under X11 cannot extend outside of the top-level window they belong to, because they do not use a separate windowing system surface; if they did, like menus, they would not be able to remain open even when clicking outside of them.
This cannot be fixed in GTK3, see:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747509
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/543
You must use Wayland, or you must ensure that your window is big enough to display your popover.
You also probably want to use gtk_popover_set_position(), gtk_popover_set_pointing_to(), or gtk_popover_set_constrain_to() to ensure that your popover always opens within the window surface, instead of outside.
I am looking for a solution for display a window over the page like a dialog box but this box will contains a lot of information. It is for my betting game, i display a list of game with a choice between 1 N and 2.
Here is an image of a betting game named netbet :
As you can see i have selected 2.10 in the game Slavia Mozyr/ FC Minsk and a window appears at the bottom of the page for set the amount of money i need to bet. I think it will be better,because mobile screen are very little, displaying a window over the page like a dialog box. Is there a solution for do that in flutter ? Thanks
You might want to use Bottom sheet which does the exact task. It opens a small 'page' (read: widget) over the normal app screen. It'll allow to place the bet etc. It vanishes when use taps anywhere outside.
Sample implementation is here. You can also check solid bottom sheet.
Im trying to retrieve typing information such as the on-screen coordinates of where a user presses a key on a keyboard on Android and iOS using flutter similar to how swiftkey does it to generate their heatmaps.
How would I go about doing this? Do I have to create my own custom keyboard
I've tried to implement the suggestion here: How to Calculate the Coordinates of touch in Flutter?
But once the keyboard drawer pops up, the on-screen coordinates do not register.
To do this you would have to show your own keyboard that you build in flutter. The reason for this is that the keyboard which pops up is actually a different android window (or at least activity, but pretty sure window and likely process as well), that is shown over top of the window that flutter is rendering into. By design, the keypresses can't be recorded as that would be a security issue (the active app is one thing, but imagine if another app could record keypresses or even location of taps - they could steal your passwords!).
There may be some android-specific way of doing it that I'm not aware of, but it probably won't work on all devices and all keyboards and is likely not a good route to follow.
In WindowsForms there is a property called TopMost that when True makes the window always in front of anything else in the desktop (like dialog messages). I'd to know if there is a opposite property in GTK+, in that when activated would make the window stay in the back of every thing on the desktop.
There's a line between the window manager's capabilities and what a UI toolkit can do. The toolkit takes care of the window's content, the window manager determines the placement and layering of windows. Such property is likely to be non-existent. It is potentially not feasible to implement the desired property across platforms (WMs) in a meaningful way.
Furthermore Gtk.WindowType only suggests only POPUP and TOPLEVEL.
Are you looking for a Gtk.StatusIcon for selectively showing and hiding your application window?
I term of usability, I'm wondering what's the best solution to display my confirm message.
I have a long form, and in small screen I can't see the top of the form.
When I'm submitting my form, where is the best position for my message "Your information has been saved"?
In the top of the form, and I add an automatic scroll up ?
In the bottom close to the save button?
In a dialog box?
Other solutions?
I tried to find that on Internet but nothing really interesting. Please quote your source if you have an answer for me.
Thanks!
If this is the only place in your application that has this functionality, it doesn't matter so much; if you already have it working one way or the other somewhere else, consistency is the most important.
Where will the user need to navigate to next? If navigation is at the top, auto-scrolling them to the top and showing a message there might be appropriate.
If the navigation is on the left side, auto-scrolling will lose the user's place in the page, which will make navigation harder. In this case, tell them right next to the submit button.
If there's only one place they can navigate to next, skip the AJAX and do an interstitial "success!" screen that also takes them to the next place they'll want to navigate.
But most of all? Consistency with the rest of your app.