Re: [Gmod-ajax] Similie

[Mitch S. <mi...@ar...>]

-----Original Message-----
>
> From: Ann Loraine [mailto:alo...@gm...]
> Sent: Fri 01/06/2007 16:32
> To: Aanensen, David
> Subject: Re: [Gmod-ajax] Similie
>
> This is nice!
>
> Is it possible to focus the zooming at a single position or selection, so
> that the item you want to examine in detail doesn't scoot off the 
> screen as
> you zoom in?
>

This isn't implemented, but technically it's not too hard; in fact if 
you zoom out when you're close to the edge of a chromosome you can see 
that the fixed point of the zoom isn't at the center.  It should be easy 
to do something similar for zooming in (there's already a "zoomLoc" that 
usually defaults to 0.5 but gets set differently when zooming out near 
the edge).  It's less a question of technical possibility than one of 
how the UI should work. 

I was just looking at PlantIGB.  Am I missing something, or is the 
scrollbar the only way to scroll?  I think click-and-drag is a much 
nicer way to scroll, especially when you're zoomed way in and a small 
scrollbar movement might take you several screens over.  But if you're 
scrolling by click-and-drag, then IMO it's a little confusing to 
overload the click to set the hairline as well.  Maybe we could have a 
region in which you click to set the zoom focus point.  Or maybe we 
could have a double-click zoom in around the click position.

One of the things I'd very much like to do at some point is get some 
relatively naive (to our software) users in here to watch them using 
it.  When I was working in a biology lab I found that incredibly helpful 
for understanding how a UI should work.  We've got biology undergrads 
coming out of our ears here so maybe we could bribe some with free pizza 
or something.

It's useful to discuss UI issues on this list, but IMO user testing is 
the final arbiter of what does or doesn't work.  It certainly is nice to 
have some IGB/Apollo/GBrowse veterans to talk to, though.

Mitch