[instaviz-users] Opinions wanted: sketching vs scrolling

[Daniel Grobe Sachs]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 11:52:49AM +0900, Glen Low wrote:
> Hi All
> 
> I hope you've all had a chance to play with Instaviz and are settling  
> into the group nicely. Special thanks to Richard, Jeremy, Thomas,  
> David and Juan for taking the time and effort to submit bug tickets  
> for Instaviz -- I'll be attending to some of them this week.
> 
> I need your opinion on how scrolling and sketching should interact.
> 
> In a typical iPhone app, you can scroll the screen by dragging,  
> swiping or flicking with your fingers. In a drawing app like Instaviz,  
> we have to support drawing with similar sorts of finger gestures. The  
> question is: how to get Instaviz to distinguish between a drag to  
> scroll and a drag to sketch?
> 
> As I see it, there are three broad ways to do it:
> 
[...]

Reading through these and the following discussion, I think I just want
to put in one thing:

Minimizing choice is a good thing. The more choices there are, the more
things that there are to go wrong. 

This mantra rules out mechanism 3 (slider = modal = bad), and makes 2 iffy
because there's an implicitly a choice involved in how long a delay
should be required before the "draw" action is initiatied. (When I
played with it in 0.1.2, I thought the delay was too long.) This means
that if we go by the principle of minimizing choice, 1 is the best
option---it requires no state and no configuration, and while it may not
be entirely intuitive there is no possibility of choosing the wrong
parameter. 

dan

-- 
| Daniel Grobe Sachs      <dgsachs at nekito.net> |
| The time is gone, the song is over, thought  |
|        I'd something more to say...          |