Ver 3 Weaker graphic design distracts

[Philip King]

On Friday, 7 January, 2005, Timothy J.Wood said:

>The other thing that Brian forgot to mention is that the new 
>selection display gives a visual indication of how far down the
>children of the selection extend.  So, on OO2, you can easily
>select the parent of a long list and scroll down and find the
>end, no matter how long the list is.  This is really, really
>important -- try doing this in OO2 and it is pretty hard to do
>this operation reliably.
>

I have three replies to this: in the first case, to operate on a
long list under a parent - for example, to move it - I would simply
toggle it closed first; secondly, the bottom of a list under a
parent is indented relative to any following item which holds the
same level as the parent, regardless of whether the parent is in
view; and thirdly, if stronger differentiation is required then the
user may change the style applying to that level.

OmniOutliner 3 now tries too hard, offering unwanted help where it
was not required and diminishing utility where no change was needed.
Apart from the over-enthusiastic highlighting another example comes
when expanding an item to display the children - if the resulting
list will extend below the window the item is moved to the first
line of the window, requiring use of the scroll bar in order to
return to the position before the list was expanded.


- Philip


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