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Bug 329083

Summary: only shows actions on field focus?
Product: z_Archived Reporter: Konstantin Komissarchik <konstantin>
Component: SapphireAssignee: Project Inbox <sapphire.ui-inbox>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Konstantin Komissarchik CLA 2010-10-29 14:02:30 EDT 
Many modern webapps have adopted the pattern of only showing action buttons
when the field in question has focus. I think it is an approach that is worth
considering for Sapphire. When a user is faced with a large form with many
fields, there could be quite a few action buttons. These buttons contribute
quite a bit of visual noise to a form. Not showing them until the focus is on
the field in question would reduce the level of noise. The downside is that
some actions would take two clicks instead of one... adding new entry to a
list... picking a value from a browse dialog.

We need to understand which way the tradeoff scale tips in this case.
Comment 1 Konstantin Komissarchik CLA 2010-10-29 14:03:10 EDT 
From Troy:
----------

Yeah, that is a cool feature.  It has some nice charateristics for
object-based editors where it's natural to select things because direct
manipulation is a dominant part of the interaction. (Though for some reason I
really dislike it in Word when their toolbar comes up over an image.)

It seems a little less straighforward to adapt this to forms - though could
be an interesting area to explore.  Also, as alluded to in the last line of
your initial comment - it's also probably the kind of thing where you'd want
to bounce early ideas of people to get feedback, even informally, because
it's less clear in this case that we'd actually making things better - it
could end up just being somewhat bothersome realtive to existing form
conventions.