In GUI dialogs, most applications provide for keyboard control as follows:
Enter key - presses the default button. (Default is usually indicated with a bold button border.)
Esc key - presses the Cancel or close button.
Space key - presses widget that currently has keyboard focus.
Tab key - advances focus to next widget.
Question is, when keyboard focus is on a widget that is a button, should the default button be changed to be the one with focus?
I see some issues with this behavior:
The display noise of redrawing buttons to unbold the outline of original default button and rebold the button under focus as being new default.
The Space key is now somewhat redundant with Enter key.
There is no keyboard accelerator to get the normal default button now (Usually the OK button).
However, it seems the trend has been in this direction to change the default button with focus change to another button. What is the rationale for this departure from the early GUIs? It would seem to provide less functionality given there is no way to press the original default button. Did people find that the original model was too complicated for users to understand? I would think keyboard control of dialogs would be a task for advanced users who would have no trouble understanding the model and prefer to have accelerator for current button (Space) and original default button (Enter) at all times.
Note that Qt for one is supporting the change: QPushButton's autoDefault property is responsible for the behavior of changing the default button. By default its value is true. Therefore, you must take extra action to set it to false for all buttons, to prevent them from becoming the default button when focused.
This is not a "departure from the early GUIs", at least not if by "early GUIs", you mean Windows 1.0. The behavior that you describe has been this way since the beginning.
The focused button is always "pushed" when the Enter key is pressed. The default button is only triggered in the following two situations:
The default button has the focus (which it does by default), or
The focus is on a control that does not process Enter key presses (such as a static control, or a single-line textbox that does not have the ES_WANTRETURN style flag set).
The famous Win32 blogger Raymond Chen has a post explaining this behavior (focus specifically on the last two quoted paragraphs):
A dialog box maintains the concept of a "default button" (which is always a pushbutton). The default button is typically drawn with a distinctive look (a heavy outline or a different color) and indicates what action the dialog box will take when you hit Enter. Note that this is not the same as the control that has the focus.
For example, open the Run dialog from the Start menu. Observe that the OK button is the default button; it has a different look from the other buttons. But focus is on the edit control. Your typing goes to the edit control, until you hit Enter; the Enter activates the default button, which is OK.
As you tab through the dialog, observe what happens to the default button. When the dialog box moves focus to a pushbutton, that pushbutton becomes the new default button. But when the dialog box moves focus to something that isn't a pushbutton at all, the OK button resumes its position as the default button.
The dialog manager remebers which control was the default button when the dialog was initially created, and when it moves focus to something that isn't a button, it restores that original button as the default button.
The behavior that I would expect is:
If I press enter when the window just pop up, it should press the default button
If I press tab, I start navigating through the widgets. In this case there are two options:
2.1 I press enter - this event should be delivered to the focused widget. There's no need to change the default button - simply hand the event to the focused widget.
2.2 I press escape. In this case, everything should go back to the state after the window is created.
Notes:
I come from a mixed background - I don't know if I learned this in windows, linux or Mobile OSes! This is just how I expect things to work out.
I don't use the space key (didn't know it's functionality)
Related
There are two buttons 'Show Less' and 'Show More'. I cannot use toggle buttons here because there is a middle state(displays one line of content by default) in the default view.
Let's say a user tabs to 'Show more' and activates the button, the section below expands and Show more button gets disabled.
When user selects one of the buttons, is it reasonable to set focus to opposite buttons button even if it's one step backwards in the reading order(for example Show Less is before Show More).
From an accessibility perspective, you normally don't want to move the focus off a button after it's been selected, but when a button becomes disabled after selecting it, you'd be ok moving the focus to the previous button. You could leave the focus where it is and the screen reader would announce that the button is no longer active, but that can sometimes cause another accessibility issue if the focus indicator disappears because the element became inactive (2.4.7 - Focus Visible).
I find the graphical feedback when pressing buttons (WKInterfaceButton) in watchOS2 is very weak. It is hard to see and even Apple seems to thinks this is the case as they e.g. in the unlock screen change the background to white on active buttons. The default behaviour is to dim the whole button.
How can I make a button press cleared in watchOS 2? I can e.g. change the button text color on activity but how do I easily change it back when it is no longer active?
There is currently no way to detect touch-down, or other events, on WKInterfaceButtons like you can on UIButtons on iOS. The only touch event you can detect is touch-up-inside, which calls the IBAction method.
Therefore what you wish to accomplish cannot be accomplished. Something you might consider is animating the button appearance once the action has been triggered. For example in my app upon button tap I animate the button's background color, then animate it back to the original color. That provides more visual confirmation to the user so they are certain the button was tapped.
I'd encourage you to file an enhancement request at bugreport.apple.com if you'd like to have more control with touch events.
I want to implement my own sequence for changing the focus of the active child widget using the Tab key. How to capture the Tab Key press event? I am using Qt5.2
If you want to change focus with Tab , you don't need to do those works, Qt has it as a feature.
First: set the desired widgets to be Qt::TabFocus or Qt::StrongFocus by QWidget::setFocusPolicy( Qt::FocusPolicy policy )
For example, if you want to rotate between 3 QLineEdit and 1 QCombobox, you have to assure that their focus policy have been set right. (Normally either Qt::TabFocus or Qt::StrongFocus will be set as default, but sometimes you might want to escape some widgets from being tabbed)
Second: go to designer mode and click "Edit Tab Order" to enter the tab-order editing mode
Third: After seeing the numbers, click on them until you got the desired sequence order.
(Picture from Qt official site)
Have a mouse press event or a event filter, get to the point where you have a QKeyEvent
Then only do something if tab was pressed
key_event->button() == Qt::Key_Tab
I have a custom TextInput that listens for the FocusEvent.FOCUS_IN and FocusEvent.FOCUS_OUT events:
textDisplay.addEventListener(FocusEvent.FOCUS_IN, onFocusInHandler);
textDisplay.addEventListener(FocusEvent.FOCUS_OUT, onFocusOutHandler);
My onFocusInHandler function basically removes a "promptview" that tells the user to type in a value, with the onFocusOutHandler doing the opposite.
For example, if the TextInput text was backspaced to a blank value and the user clicks out of the TextInput box, it would show a "Please enter a value" light-gray prompt in the TextInput.
This works fine until the user clicks our custom "Clear" button. The clear button sets the text to "", and I can tell the FocusEvent.FOCUS_OUT is received because the prompt text is set to visible (its not being set anywhere else). The problem is, the cursor remains in the box as if it still has focus, so if the user immediately starts typing, both the prompt text "Please enter a value" and the user-entered text appears over the gray text, which looks pretty ugly and unreadable.
Why does the TextInput receive the FocusEvent.FOCUS_OUT event if it's not actually losing focus? Is there any way I can get around this?
Option 1. Use the Spak TextInput in Flex 4.1 or 4.5. This already provides a promptDisplay by default (as mentioned in the comments)
Option 2. Take a look at the focus-skin. This skin class is usually placed on top of the normal skin. There could exist some focus ambiguity between these two. Try using a custom focus-skin without a textDisplay and clear button.
Option 3. Not only use a focus event to show or hide the prompt, but also look at the content of the TextInput. You don't want to display a prompt when the text is set by binding as wel.
I'm trying to design a UI in Qt and I can't find anywhere in the designer a button which can be "droped down" like combobox. What I mean by that is that I would like to have this button with his "default" option choosen so if I like it I would have to just click on it but if I would like to choose different option I would be able to clik the little arrow on the right side of this button and then pick option suitable for me at that moment.
You're looking for a QToolButton that has a set of actions or a menu set on it. From the documentation, the QToolButton::ToolButtonPopupMode...
Describes how a menu should be popped up for tool buttons that has a menu set or contains a list of actions.
Of it's values, the two that I see most frequently are DelayedPopup:
After pressing and holding the tool button down for a certain amount of time (the timeout is style dependant, see QStyle::SH_ToolButton_PopupDelay), the menu is displayed. A typical application example is the "back" button in some web browsers's tool bars. If the user clicks it, the browser simply browses back to the previous page. If the user presses and holds the button down for a while, the tool button shows a menu containing the current history list
And MenuButtonPopup:
In this mode the tool button displays a special arrow to indicate that a menu is present. The menu is displayed when the arrow part of the button is pressed.