How to emulate mouse position in FireFox? - firefox

I'm trying to figure a lot of hover/mouseover related CSS/Javascript on a webpage.
To do so, I use Firefox+firebug inspectors.
The problem, is that whenever I move the mouse out of an element I'm inspecting, all the "hover reactions" are lost.
Is there a way, to fix the mouse position firefox sees so I can freely use the mouse withouth concern about weiter it actually hovers some elements or not?

Well, it is not fixing the mouse position, but when you right-click on an element in the Inspector in the regular Developer Tools, you're offered a :hover menu item (along some other things). Selecting that will put the element into permanent :hover state. That at least should cover the CSS-part of your question. I'm sure Firebug offers something similar.
For the JS-part, I'd just set a breakpoint somewhere.

Related

Programmatically disable "Shake to find pointer" MacOS feature without hiding cursor

I am aware of this question, but that's different to what I am looking for, as the accepted answer hides the cursor.
I'm writing software that remaps the left mouse button to the left CTRL key.
I have it working, with one problem: when I hold down the CTRL key and drag the mouse pointer this feature often activates, which messes up my drag operation (it feels like trying to change direction running on ice).
So the Apple engineers must have disabled this feature while the left mouse button is down and re-enabled it when the button is released.
Something like this -- however when I inject my simulated mouse events, the feature does not disable.
What I'm getting at is: there must be some programmatic way of doing it, even if it is an internal Apple function. Unless Apple are using the solution in the linked answer, i.e. NSCursor.hide() and then manually drawing the cursor icon at the cursor location.
How can I accomplish this cleanly?
EDIT: A CGEventTap for NSEventTypeGesture or NSEventTypeMagnify fails to catch anything.

Can the Firefox DevTools Inspector highlight be made sticky?

I'm spending some time writing HTML and CSS, and am using the developer tools in Firefox 53. Specifically, the "HTML/DOM/CSS Inspector".
When you move the mouse over a chunk of HTML in the Inspector window, the corresponding rendered HTML element on the page is highlighted. Plus, there are some helpful grid lines and color overlays and whatnot also drawn over the page, all of which was a good decision on the part of the Mozilla developers. It shows how random divs and other elements might be overlapping, is great for showing where margins are collapsing, etc.
However, when I move the mouse off the HTML tree, all that useful highlighting and overlays vanish. Is there a way to get that highlighting/overlay to "stick"? For example, until I click on another HTML element, or reload the page, or... actively take some action other than simply moving my mouse?
Note that right-clicking the Inspector and selecting the ":hover" menu entry is most emphatically not what I'm looking for. I want to change the mouseover behavior of the Inspector, not that of the page.
(Now I'm going to pour another shot of whiskey and resume fighting with the Rules/Computed-versus-"browser styles" controls. Those were... not as well designed.)
The general highlighter can't be toggled to stay on the page, it only reacts on hovering the nodes.
Only some other highlighters are sticky, like the one for elements matching a specific CSS selector or the CSS grid highlighter, both located within the Rules side panel:
The CSS selector matching highlighter is currently (as of Firefox 53) the one that comes nearest to what you're looking for, though it's missing the grid lines.
Furthermore, there is already a request for adding a sticky element highlighter in Mozilla's bug tracker.

Show hide symbol in Adobe Edge

Just trying to get my head around Adobe Edge. What I want to achieve sounds simple but having real trouble. I have a button element, that when mouseover, displays an animated symbol I have.
Currently my code,on the button is Mouseout:
sym.$("pgicatext2").hide();
and mouseover:
sym.$("pgicatext2").show();
This doesn't seem to be working. I can achieve the result if, I turn off the movie symbol, and use this code on the button
sym.$("pgicatext2").toggle();
The trouble is of course it doesn't replay the animation every time you mouse over, and all the while it's hidden it's playing the animation.
I see its been a month since you posted this. Hopefully you solved your issue. Your code for hiding and showing looks right. One thing I have had happen in some of my projects is that I inadvertently placed an object or symbol with 0% opacity on top of a button or something I had a mouse over event. Make sure that the button you have does not have anything layered on top of it. Another thing would be to turn off autoplay of your symbol, and add sym.$("pgicatext2").play(); into your mouse over. I know those are pretty obvious answers, but sometimes it is easy to forget the obvious.
Please get through following steps:
Check if the button is over all other visible layers ('Elements'
tab). Maybe setting cursor to 'pointer' will help to check it.
Use 'Mouseenter' and 'Mouseleave' instead of 'Mouseover' and
'Mouseout'. The difference is explained here.
Make sure that your animated symbols 'autoplay' option is off. If
you did not tick it off while creating the symbol, just set Playback
to 'Stop' on Stage at the very beginning of the timeline
Lets do some coding. Lets assume that your animated symbols name is
"film". You need to set following actions to your button element:
Mouseenter:
sym.$("film").show();
sym.getSymbol("film").play();
this basically shows up your 'film' element and plays 'film' symbol
Mouseleave:
sym.$("film").hide();
sym.getSymbol("film").stop(0);
this one hides your 'film' element and stops 'film' symbol at the beginning of animation (0ms)
Enjoy!

is there a trick to working with multiple visual studio panel objects at design time

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.

Cool user interface alternatives and improvements for Scroll Bars

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.

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