Re: [nebula-dev] Date Selection Widgets

[Roland Tepp <roland@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Jeremy,

I'll respond in-line as well:

Jeremy Dowdall kirjutas mulle  midagi seesugust:

Hi Roland,

 Thanks for the overall impression and the comments - I'll respond in-line:

Roland Tepp wrote:
  

   1. I personally dislike time entry by dragging hands of analog clock
      - it seems to require too good mouse control.
    

A feature request was to have the hands "snap" at programmatically set
intervals and this seems to help reduce the amount of control required
fairly well.
  

Good then :)

      Maybe if there was a way to enter hour/minute/second values by
      typing (smt. like month/year chooser in the calendar part).
    

I had initially not seen the point of this because I was always using it
as a drop component to the CDatepickerCombo and the user could do this
in the text region.  However, if the CDatepicker is placed directly on a
composite then perhaps a DIGITAL_CLOCK style could be useful and would
render a CDatepickerCombo (of style SIMPLE) in the clock region. Another
possibility would be to use a two column table (like the Act! drop time
widget) which has toggle buttons to select the hour/minute values...
More thoughts... ?
  

I was actually thinking in line of having a style flag that would draw digital clock controls *in addition* to analog clock.
One could drag clock hands if they like mouse-only control and/or type in desired time value using "digital controls".
These controls could be either above or below the analog clock... I really don't know which style to prefer.

      Or have a style flag/option to render time picker similar to what
      Mozilla Sunbird calendar offers:
    

I haven't built Sunbird in a awhile - is there a screen shot you could
refer?

I've made some screen shots of these on my windows box:
The time entry drop down can be in one of two modes:

The first one is what I call "compact" and it displays table with all available hours plus another table below it containing some most commonly used minute values (those ending with 0 and 5). There is also an "expand" or "more" button below tables that allows choosing arbitary minute values by entering the second mode.

Second mode is the one I like to call "expanded" - and it displays a table of all possible minute values.

User can switch between compact and expanded versions by toggling chevrons beneath the tables.

It seems that the drawback of this ui is that it does not facilitate as easy  keyboard navigation as calendar of the date chooser, since you need to make two choices instead of one.

I see this style working beautifully as digital time chooser dropdown - at least it beats by a long run any other dropdown style time pickers I've seen so far...

A user requested a feature that would allow for a more convenient way to
set years that were a long way off (10+ years) and thus the "year
editing mode" was created - I think it is a good request and this is a
step in the right direction, but it's not there yet...
  

Well - since you already go into "editing mode" with year number - why not having the "old style" and new style merge by having the year and month values organized like in the old style on the screenshot, having spinner buttons beside them. And in addition allowing to enter the "editing mode" of either one of those. That would make meaning of spinner arrows much more immediately clear and would also allow larger jumps in time.

Can I use it ;)
    

of course! :)
  

I found out you have a dependency on SWT 3.2, although tiny one that can easily be amended - setValues method on the spinner control does not exist in Eclipse 3.1 (which is currently the target platform I am still using)...

-- 
  Roland Tepp

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