Write it up for somebody, maybe...
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Who's missing buttons and controls under big 7 and big 8 ? Not you ? Well, what if somebody decides to fix our problem by designing us a popup that will diagram, on a mouseover, the tab order of controls on any form or dialog, showing icons with interconnecting arrows unambiguously laying out for us what will happen when you press the Tab key (once, twice, ... ). Too much work for too little pay ? I thought so.
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Who's missing buttons and controls under big 7 and big 8 ? Not you ? Well, what if somebody decides to fix our problem by designing us a popup that will diagram, on a mouseover, the tab order of controls on any form or dialog, showing icons with interconnecting arrows unambiguously laying out for us what will happen when you press the Tab key (once, twice, ... ). Too much work for too little pay ? I thought so.
GAMerritt wrote:
what if somebody decides to fix our problem by designing us a popup that will diagram, on a mouseover, the tab order of controls on any form or dialog, showing icons with interconnecting arrows unambiguously laying out for us what will happen when you press the Tab key (once, twice, ... ).
Why bother? I have never (and I truly mean, NEVER) seen a non-programmer user actually use the tab key. Just watch how someone logs in: click on username enter username click on password enter password click on "Log In" Even though the programmer coded the tab order and default button action such that the user could use tab and enter without once having to lay their hands on the mouse. Most users don't even realize that the programmer also set up the username field as the focused control, and that they don't need to click on the username to begin with, they can just start typing. Marc
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Who's missing buttons and controls under big 7 and big 8 ? Not you ? Well, what if somebody decides to fix our problem by designing us a popup that will diagram, on a mouseover, the tab order of controls on any form or dialog, showing icons with interconnecting arrows unambiguously laying out for us what will happen when you press the Tab key (once, twice, ... ). Too much work for too little pay ? I thought so.
Technically this would not be that difficult to do, but I tend to be skeptical, as (I perceive) Marc is, whether end-users would actually use it, let alone find it of value. If someone wanted (was paying me) me to implement this (in WinForms), I'd use a TreeView. In some cases there is a perfectly clear flow-of-focus from one control to another, as when, for example, you fill out a structured form; or when you have focus set on a list or dropdown menu, and you want tabs to move you, in sequence, through the list entries. But, in modern asynchronous user-interfaces ... imagine a tool palette in a graphic design program ... the user will set focus at any given moment depending on what they want to do: there is no clearly logical next target control that the use of the tab key should move you to. In WinForms, you can, of course, set a control's TabStop property to 'false to keep it out of the tab-order. The "CodeSmart" tools add-on for Visual Studio 2010/12 from Axtools.com (not freeware, not open-source) does have a special facility for design-time editing of tab-order [^] among its many useful tools, and VS user-interface enhancements. yours, Bill
“Humans are amphibians: half spirit, half animal; as spirits they belong to the eternal world; as animals they inhabit time. While their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imagination are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy is undulation: repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” C.S. Lewis
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Technically this would not be that difficult to do, but I tend to be skeptical, as (I perceive) Marc is, whether end-users would actually use it, let alone find it of value. If someone wanted (was paying me) me to implement this (in WinForms), I'd use a TreeView. In some cases there is a perfectly clear flow-of-focus from one control to another, as when, for example, you fill out a structured form; or when you have focus set on a list or dropdown menu, and you want tabs to move you, in sequence, through the list entries. But, in modern asynchronous user-interfaces ... imagine a tool palette in a graphic design program ... the user will set focus at any given moment depending on what they want to do: there is no clearly logical next target control that the use of the tab key should move you to. In WinForms, you can, of course, set a control's TabStop property to 'false to keep it out of the tab-order. The "CodeSmart" tools add-on for Visual Studio 2010/12 from Axtools.com (not freeware, not open-source) does have a special facility for design-time editing of tab-order [^] among its many useful tools, and VS user-interface enhancements. yours, Bill
“Humans are amphibians: half spirit, half animal; as spirits they belong to the eternal world; as animals they inhabit time. While their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imagination are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy is undulation: repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” C.S. Lewis
You note that "there is no clearly logical next target control" in that tab order. Exactly. I like to on the spur of the moment decide that I'm going to do whatever as fast as I possibly can, with Tab, Ctrl-Tab, Alt-Tab, Shift-Tab altogether if possible. And sometimes if I don't have much open simultaneously the Ctrl-Tab and Alt-Tab work out just nice. But trying to get my keyboard time down to the equivalent of 80 words per minute (i.e., calling a change of focus a 'word') or more, there are times when I am popping up a dialog in an app run by the JVM, or one in which the tab order isn't the bare-bones Explorer dialog (Open/Save) and I often pass up a cyclic edit keystroke sequence that would work fast and haul the mouse over just because I can't anticipate precisely where the focus is going to shift to. I find I run so much different software, and there's always something new to try out; that I thought it might be handy to have a transparent overlay pop up on some designated keypress to show what the focus could shift to on these keys. Not that a novice would need it. Nobody's too dumb to figure stuff like that out on the spur of the moment by trial-and-error, or a good hunch. But when the UI is going the way of the tile-gaucho I tend to wonder, if you don't use the keyboard shortcuts a heck of a lot more, what DO you do? I phrased my query in the tentative way I did because, like you say, it's obvious that there's no standard way of doing things like that, and the mother of invention can bring us what she wants; and outside of that-- Who's going to care? Just me, I guess. I was using VS Express, so I don't have a real big option for personalization or enhancements in the IDE; but what I was thinking of was in general, over the whole gamut of dialogs and controls that have some spatially distinct distribution and ordering that leads to an as-logical-as-we-can-manage tab order; and when it goes beyond the obvious, that's where I'd think having an overlay pop up temporarily might come in handy.