If you have a folder sorted by a certain column, and then you click and drag the vertical scrollbar, Explorer will display a little helper rectangle showing where in the sort list you currently are. This is what I'm talking about:
I was wondering if anyone knew how to obtain a handle or UIAutomation ID of that little rectangle (if one exists). So far I've been trying with Spy++ and Inspect, but I can't seem to figure it out (in part because the rectangle is fleeting and disappears as soon as you lift the mouse button). Thank you for any response or guidance.
Is there some sort of shortcut key that I am missing here for swapping panels around in the form editor of vs2010?
I have numerous panels which are swapped at runtime according to an enum "toggle" value and the only way I seem to be able to move them back and forth is to make one panel smaller than another and right click it. Half the time I end up selecting some other object in the action of trying to right my panels.
I figured there must be something i'm missing here.
there are icons on the layout toolbar for this task. I pick the panel in properties and move it around with those. Way easier than right clicking and hoping for the best.
edit: although sometimes the buttons are not enabled when you need them to be. Still right clicking a resize handle adorner dot will pop up the context menu where you can then choose to move back/forward.
I still wish there was some key combo I could press. Hitting the 4px of display area that the adorner dot occupies on my screen is sort of a dexterity test of sorts and slows me down.
Inside a MFC dialog, I have 2 overlapping rows of text boxes (what user can see is only one row). when I clicked a button, i shifted down the row at bottom, so now user can see both rows.
The problem is if I have some data loaded in DoDataExchange() for the text boxes, I wouldn't be able to see them showing when the dialog boots up. But when I click inside the text box, the data shows.
I want to know what exactly happen when I clicked a UI? What drawing functions are invoked at backgrounds? So I can fix my problem.
Thank you.
ZQ
Nothing is drawn when you click, maybe you are seeing an Invalidate() being triggered for some reason that redraws the text boxes. Or maybe the parent control (dialog, I assume) doesn't have WS_CLIPCHILDREN set, or some other funny things are happening with the WS_CLIPXXX flags (they're somewhat of a black art).
More to the point, use Spy++ to check what 'happens' when you click - i.e. the messages that are posted at each point in time.
Scroll bars are really boring. I've seen a few really inventive new user interfaces for updating these. I believe there are many better ways to spend 10px then with a solid color and static buttons. Here are two examples I've found:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PnXY4wjuH8
http://chikuyonok.ru/u/demo/infoscroller/
(credit for this link goes to this question uses HTML5 Canvas )
Do you have any other ideas to add to this list? How can we give a better idea of view-status in the document, without wasting so much real estate? How can we add more functionality to the notorious dead space on the right?
Firstly, one should be very careful about “updating” the scrollbar. The scrollbar is a great success story, a simple, elegant, powerful control that is critical for successful computer use and almost universally understood by users. Trying to improve the scrollbar is like trying to improve the ballpoint pen. It’s stayed the same for so long because there’s really not much more you can do. Being "boring" is not a good reason to improve it. Users don’t use an app or site because it has new and "cool" controls. They use an app or site because it lets them accomplish their tasks. To improve the scrollbar, consider how changes can improve task completion.
Good things the humble scrollbar has:
Capacity to scroll one pane-full.
Capacity to scroll one line (fine tuning).
The capacity to do each of the above repeatedly without moving the mouse (so a user reading some content only has to click occasionally after initially placing the mouse over the right spot).
Allows random access to anywhere in the pane by simple linear drag and drop.
Intuitively shows the relative position in the content (e.g., allowing the user to judge how close s/he is to the end).
Intuitively shows the relative size of content by the size of the slider relative to the track.
Supports intuitive keyboard activation via the cursor keys -good shortcuts, and good for accessibility.
Supports clickamatic (pressing down and holding the mouse button to scroll multiple lines or pane-fulls).
Very smooth real-time feedback on user actions.
All in a remarkable compact and unobtrusive control that doesn’t distract from the content (what the user is really interested in).
You don’t want to mess with any of that. In particular, the pop-up scrollbar you link to is probably a bad idea because it interferes with the capacity to scroll by a pane-full by clicking the track. That is perhaps the most common user action so it deserves the greatest number of pixels (i.e., the track).
On the other hand, building on existing scrollbar capability, like the Infoscroller you link to, is a something worth investigating further. For the original research on this concept, see:
McCrickard DS and Catrambone R (1999)
Beyond the scrollbar: An evolution and
evaluation of alternative navigation
techniques. Georgia Institute of
Technology Technical Report
GIT-GVU-97-19.
Obviously, what you show in the scrollbar track depends on your content. A thumbnail of the content won’t work well for a text table or list. For that, Greg Raiz has suggested indicating the values for the current sort order. If there’s not enough space, maybe tooltips or callouts can appear pointing to key places in the track to drag to. MS Word does something similar with this, showing a tooltip indicating the page and section of the current drag-to point.
Here’re some other ways we could build on the scrollbar:
More Buttons. I’ve seen suggestions to include both up and down buttons at the top and bottom so the user can transition between scrolling down and up without having to slew the entire height of the pane. Or you could have buttons to scroll immediately to the beginning and end of the content, handy for users who don’t know about Ctrl-Home and Ctrl-End, saving them from making a long drag of the slider. MS Word includes buttons to execute the last Find or Goto, among other possibilities.
Split bar. On the subject of MS Word, MS Word and Excel scrollbars include a split control to allow you to divide the window into two panes. That would be handy for a lot of other applications, such as browsers and large lists and tables.
Expert activation. If you don’t want to clutter the scrollbar with more buttons and controls, consider providing expert shortcuts via meta keys. Ctrl-clicking an arrow button could scroll the user to the beginning and end of the content. Ctrl-clicking the track could instantly scroll to the corresponding position in the content, particularly useful if you’ve implemented Infoscroller. Ctrl-clicking the slider could pop open a mini dialog or text box to enter a page number, list item identifier, or Find criteria to jump to.
Left side scrollbar. There is some research suggesting we should usually be putting vertical scrollbar on the left side, rather than the right (see Kellener E, Barnes GM, & Lingard R (2001), Effects of scroll bar orientation and item justification, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 45th Annual Meeting). Having the scrollbar position consistent with the content alignment means less average slew distances for faster scrollbar use. In the same vein, putting the scrollbar on the left in a browser would shorten the distance between the scrollbar and the Back button for faster navigation. However, the advent of the scrollwheel may have made this idea obsolete.
Great question. Please see RockScroll, which is now standard in Visual Studio 2013 Preview: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingRockScroll.aspx
RockScroll in turn inspired MetalScroll:
which in turn inspired RockMargin.
Also, Jetbrains Resharper plug-in for Visual Studio puts a vertical affordance to the right of the scrollbar. The information is displayed as little horizontal bars of different colors. These bars indicate a piece of code that can be improved. Clicking on a bar scrolls the code page to bring the code in question into view:
Also, most file comparison software uses fancy scrollbars. See Scooter Software's Beyond Compare 3.0, which puts an "infoscroller"-like affordance separate from the scrollbar. The affordance on the left is draggable like a scrollbar. In addition, to reduce the need for horizontal scrolling, there is a bottom pane which puts the current line from the left pane on top and the current line from the right pane below. Moving the info-scroller allows the user to scroll both documents simultaneously, which makes "merging" changes between two versions of the same document MUCH easier. Please see:
WinMerge has a different, equally scrollable, left-pane that functions like a scrollbar and duplicates the existing scrollbars. http://winmerge.org/about/screenshots/filecmp.png
Finally, Google Chrome integrates search functionality (the "find bar") into the scroll bar.
And Greg Raiz came up with the ABC Scrollbar:
And Overlay Scrollbars which minimize the non-client area:
And a research, gaze-enhanced scrolling techniques.
I like the Google Wave scrollbar- it seems like they've reconciled scroll bars with Fitt's Law.
I have this Win32 user-drawn tab control that is created as:
CONTROL "Tab1",IDC_TAB_CONT,"SysTabControl32",TCS_BOTTOM |
TCS_OWNERDRAWFIXED | NOT WS_VISIBLE,0,14,185,88
I'd like for this control to have its tabs resize as never to have to see the "sliding arrows":
Now, pretty much everything about this control works as expected, except for that fact that it won't respond to TabCtrl_SetItemSize. Try as I may, the size I get for the tabs when I get to draw them (in the DRAWITEMSTRUCT passed to WM_DRAWITEM) is always the size that fits the longest caption in them and never the size I've set with TabCtrl_SetItemSize.
However, in the TabCtrl_SetItemSize documentation, it says that:
[TabCtrl_SetItemSize] sets the width and height of tabs in a
fixed-width or owner-drawn tab
control.
The only way I've managed to have a decent resizing is by setting a dummy string of the desired length in it by sending the control a TCM_SETITEM message, and writing the desired text in it at draw time. This is rather inconvenient and not a particularly nice hack.
Is there anybody who would know
Why TabCtrl_SetItemSize isn't working as expected? and/or
How to set the tab size properly?
Many thanks,
joce.
Setting TCS_OWNERDRAWFIXED style is not enough, you have also to add TCS_FIXEDWIDTH style.
The minimum size of a tab is at least icon width + 3 if icon is present.
If you have icons (imageList attached to tabControl), you might get those "sliding arrows" even with fixed width (if there is less space available than: number of tabs*(icon width+3)