Zoom ideas

[Kristian]

I'll be working on zoom over the summer to improve the accessibility, so this is your chance to have an impact on how zoom will look in the future.

I'd like to hear all your ideas and thoughts about zoom, even if you might consider them impossible. Input redirection should not be something you should consider when making these suggestions; One of the goalsof this plugin will be to prepare for input redirection when it is available to us.

These are some important features I've outlined in my Google Summer of Code project allready:


Input enabled, both by todays technology, and prepared for input redirection[/*:m:67003]
The ability to follow the cursor while zoomed in. (This is the foundation of the GSoC project)[/*:m:67003]
The ability to follow focus[/*:m:67003]

Any ideas are welcome.

[siyuan]

I got this idea from a game called Supreme Commander. It's a RTS game and the special thing about this game is that on a large map, you have the ability to zoom in and get a very clear view of individual units on the map, and you can also zoom out and see the full map. I think this feature is called "strategic zoom".

See this clip to get an idea what it really looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD5APeLebTE

This is actually not a bad idea to apply to Beryl. Traditionally virtual desktops are viewed by scrolling the view to different places. I personally don't find it very usable for many reasons, including time required to go from one end to the other far end.

Imagine we implement this "strategic zoom" in Beryl, a user will be able to zoom out and oversees the full desktop, and then zoom in onto some specific area. With this feature we can have a very large virtual desktop and not worrying about getting from one side to the other is slow and not able to see the full desktop when desired to.

I think, to bring the usability further, when zoomed out, a translucent rectangle should be used to indicate the size of the actual screen size when fully zoomed in, and this rectangle should follow the mouse cursor. The shortcut for zooming in and out in the game is the mouse wheel, but in Beryl we definitely need a modifier key(s).

I think this feature can be particularly useful for graphics designers for example. What do you think?

[imported_karmapolice]

@siyuan

I don't know if it's exactly the same but I saw a video where David R. showed something like that at Novell Brainshare with Compiz. You can see it in a video although it's not yet available in Compiz, even Compiz git.

http://www.novell.com/brainshare/genera ... ons07.html (http://www.novell.com/brainshare/general_sessions07.html)

Friday's General Session
Ted's intro and Nat's demos (minute 27+)

[siyuan]

The ideas shown in the video is close to what I was talking about, but not quite the same.

I should give a more specific example. Imagine you have a screen with the resolution set to 1024x768, and you also enabled virtual desktop and set its size to 2560x2048. You now have 4 times the area you can use. Now imagine you have a whole lot of applications running every where on this virtual desktop, traditionally you would have to move your mouse cursor to the edge of the screen and scroll to the area you want to work on. This is inconvenient because you can't instantly switch your view to some place far away from the current.

If we have this zoom out ability, we can oversee the full virtual desktop (no windows moved) very easily, and move the mouse cursor to the desired area. Now let's say we have fully zoomed out (view the full virtual desktop at 1024x768), there should be a translucent rectangle (much like a selection rubber band) sized to 512x384 following the cursor, and then I press some modkey + wheelup, the area covered in the rectangle becomes larger and larger, and the rectangle also takes up larger portion of the screen. Of course the rectangle disappears short time after zooming or when fully zoomed in.

[Kristian]

That's not the job of a zoom plugin, the wall plugin allready lets you zoom out to expo mode to get an overview of the entire desktop.

The features David demonstrated won't be available any time soon; He has stated himself that it was mainly a dirty hack to demonstrate his input redirection patches, which still aren't accepted in upstream x.org. This is why I'm asking for ideas, not links to videos.

[SmSpillaz]

I think one of the main problems with InputZoom's usability was that if you were typing something and the typing cursor went offscreen, then the Zoom would not follow it and you would have to move the mouse. But other than that it sounds really interesting.

[Kristian]

I think one of the main problems with InputZoom's usability was that if you were typing something and the typing cursor went offscreen, then the Zoom would not follow it and you would have to move the mouse. But other than that it sounds really interesting.

... That's exactly what I'll be fixing with the help of AT-SPI.

[Netsrot]

1. A keybinding for toggle locking the screen so it doesn't move around when moving mouse or in future typing.
2. Keybindings for zooming horizontal and vertical(not at the same time).
3. Keybindings for saving/loading zoom state(would be nice using ctrl+Super+0-9 for saving and Super+0-9 for loading)
4. A keybinding for zoom reset.
Suggestions 1 and 2 would help me a lot for interactive apps that are tiny and where I need to use mouse.

[Kristian]

1. A keybinding for toggle locking the screen so it doesn't move around when moving mouse or in future typing.

The new zoom will support this, BUT it requires input redirection to actually work. This means that the new plugin will have the code necesarry to achieve this, but until input redirection is available, it won't be possible to use it.

[quote:dbcb9]
2. Keybindings for zooming horizontal and vertical(not at the same time).
[/quote:dbcb9]
Interesting.. Sort of stretching instead of actually zooming? I think I can manage that :)

[quote:dbcb9]
3. Keybindings for saving/loading zoom state(would be nice using ctrl+Super+0-9 for saving and Super+0-9 for loading)
4. A keybinding for zoom reset.
Suggestions 1 and 2 would help me a lot for interactive apps that are tiny and where I need to use mouse.
[/quote:dbcb9]
Excellent idea to save/restore. I'll definitely have this in mind when I write this plugin.

[davidknight24]

Apologies as I've posted this elsewhere but it also seems appropriate here too. Is it possible to improve the image quality of text at high zoom levels? Currently the text tends to go very blurry/blocky depending on settings.

[Henrik]

3. Keybindings for saving/loading zoom state(would be nice using ctrl+Super+0-9 for saving and Super+0-9 for loading).

Saving certain often-used zoom settings is probably useful. Also useful would be a zoom history, like Undo/Redo.. That way you can zoom to look at a panel or a notification and with a keystroke get back to where you were.

[Kristian]

3. Keybindings for saving/loading zoom state(would be nice using ctrl+Super+0-9 for saving and Super+0-9 for loading).

Saving certain often-used zoom settings is probably useful. Also useful would be a zoom history, like Undo/Redo.. That way you can zoom to look at a panel or a notification and with a keystroke get back to where you were.

I like that idea, it should be fairly easy to implement too.

Right now zoom can have three pre-defined zoom levels. I find that using this works very well, since it allows me to quickly zoom a terminal. It also allows you to zoom the window you are focusing, so no need to jump to the mouse either.

[Kristian]

A little update :)

1. A keybinding for toggle locking the screen so it doesn't move around when moving mouse or in future typing.

Ironicly, this is now mostly possible. I say mostly because you'll notice that the sensitivity is not altered, because we're drawing a fake cursor, and the real one moves at the normal speed. So if you zoom in 2x, it'll seem like the mouse is moving twice as fast too.

Still, helps a lot :)

[quote:a147b]
2. Keybindings for zooming horizontal and vertical(not at the same time).
[/quote:a147b]
This might turn out to be fairly difficult with the current zoom scheme since (unlike inputzoom in beryl), this actually zooms, so it moves along the z axis.
[quote:a147b]
3. Keybindings for saving/loading zoom state(would be nice using ctrl+Super+0-9 for saving and Super+0-9 for loading)
4. A keybinding for zoom reset.
Suggestions 1 and 2 would help me a lot for interactive apps that are tiny and where I need to use mouse.[/quote:a147b]
Zoom reset is now possible with the default binding of super-1, and I'll ad "copy/paste" zoom stuff soon, though it might not be stored beyond restarts of compiz.

[Kristian]

Apologies as I've posted this elsewhere but it also seems appropriate here too. Is it possible to improve the image quality of text at high zoom levels? Currently the text tends to go very blurry/blocky depending on settings.

Didn't see this until now: We're limited to the resolution of the application, we can only do so much with filters. There are some interesting ideas floating about to improve this. And there's also text-readers that can help, but is a bit beyond the scope of our plugin.

So I guess the real answer is no for the moment...