| Summary: | one pixel border between scroll bar and screen edge needs to die | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Unmaintained] kmail | Reporter: | Paul Pacheco <paulpach> |
| Component: | general | Assignee: | kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs> |
| Status: | RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED | ||
| Severity: | normal | CC: | bjoern, bluedzins, bugs-kde, dkarnout, g.batra24, gablistas, intruderkw, kde-2011.08, maurizio.colucci, oded, terozi, theosib, theosib |
| Priority: | NOR | Keywords: | junior-jobs |
| Version: | unspecified | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Platform: | Gentoo Packages | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Latest Commit: | Version Fixed In: | ||
| Sentry Crash Report: | |||
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Description
Paul Pacheco
2005-01-10 20:53:59 UTC
*** Bug 90370 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** I support this request, having to carefully target the vertical scrollbar with my mouse is driving me nuts in Konqueror. The concept of "mile high menu bar" isn't new and is described very well in Joel Spolsky's book named "User Interface Design for Programmers", chapter 7: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html "When the Macintosh was new, Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple's developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They've also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it's out of print.) Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions. But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen - the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier. Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it's already there." I seem to remember a different bug report with the same issue - that there is a space between the scrollbar and the edge of the screen that makes it impossible to easily hit the scroll bar with your mouse - but I can't to find it now. Anyway - I tested the current kmail - 3.5.5, and apparently this is no longer a big issue, because somehow the space between the rightmost scrollbars and the edge of the screen now responds to the mouse wheel by scrolling the message list - JUST the message list. Which is great if your message list takes up the entire length of the kmail screen, but if you are like me and have a message preview window taking up most of the height of the kmail window, then moving the mouse all the way to the right of message preview and scrolling will not scroll the message view but instead it will scroll the message list. Also - you still can't just grab the scrollbar (any scrollbar - message view or message list) when you throw your mouse all the way to the right. *** Bug 101026 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** please note in Bug 101026 there is a list including various KDE applications suffering from this same UI design flaw. thanks! Bug 101026 comment #8, to be specific. Is a fix for this planned for KDE4? Quite a large usability defect, IMHO. What's amazing, Firefox (in Ubuntu, at least) has regressed with version 2 and doesn't behave correctly anymore! See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/125734 It seems there's a problem with many Open Source developers' unawareness of basic usability concepts if we see this feature implemented correctly, then broken in a later version by someone :( I can confirm this issue in KDE 4.2.2. The Kmail scrollbars are useless, as one has to carefully aim his mouse at them. Other KDE applications, among them Kate, do not suffer from this issue. I can confirm in KDE 4.3 as well. The Kmail read pane, thread pane, and compose window all have a small gap between themselves and the right screen edge. This is in complete defiance of Fitt's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitt's_law I see this fixed in current trunk (will become KDE 4.5). At least for reader pane and composer pane. The message list is probably not fixable as long as it is inside of q tab-panel. But it looks a little ugly in trunk - no rounded courners anymore. May be this "fix" is just a bug that will be fixed again. This is all very basic usability stuff that's taught in the first week of any usability, HCI, or cognitive engineering class to undergrads. If it's impossible to get rid of a useless one-pixel border (in the case of the q tab panel), then it's a Qt bug, and it needs to be reported upstream. It's this kind of inattention to detail that keeps GNU/Linux market share low, and we need to work harder to make Linux desktops less annoying to use. That being said, KDE4 in general is an amazing pleasure to look at, so don't think I'm ragging on you for nothing. I'm very sad that Linux doesn't have greater market share. This is all very basic usability stuff that's taught in the first week of any usability, HCI, or cognitive engineering class to undergrads. If it's impossible to get rid of a useless one-pixel border (in the case of the q tab panel), then it's a Qt bug, and it needs to be reported upstream. It's this kind of inattention to detail that keeps GNU/Linux market share low, and we need to work harder to make Linux desktops less annoying to use. That being said, KDE4 in general is an amazing pleasure to look at, so don't think I'm ragging on you for nothing. I'm very sad that Linux doesn't have greater market share. yea, this definitively killing me, all list views in KDE have that killing feature. I have found some way to solve that by making a kwin rule to set the size of window a bit greater than the screen resolution and to place the window at 0,0(left top edge), but damn that is just a way around some problem that should not ever exist. It seems really a Qt bug, so we hope for the best... I noticed that this one pixel wide bug applies at least to KDE 4.6.2 Oxygen widget theme. So the bug lies on Oxygen. If you choose Plastique theme, the problem goes away but of course looks get worse. (In reply to comment #14) So, lets look at Oxygen Code closely. Thank you for taking the time to file a bug report. KMail2 was released in 2011, and the entire code base went through significant changes. We are currently in the process of porting to Qt5 and KF5. It is unlikely that these bugs are still valid in KMail2. We welcome you to try out KMail 2 with the KDE 4.14 release and give your feedback. |