[Geomoose-users] [Geomoose-developers] GeoMOOSE Slider Navigation control input

[Bob Basques]

My only suggestion is to leave some method for changing out the graphics via a STYLE sheet or some such.  The Navigation stuff really looks out of place in some interfaces if the user doesn't have control of how it looks.  As long as there is a method of of applying either raster tiles or styling information to the look and feel, there's no problem I can see.

One color scheme for all doesn't strike me as the right way to approach it for a number of reasons.   I would go the route of setting up a fairly strict dimensional version of things that can still be re-styled, and also think about setting up the dimensional aspect so that it can be replaced with a different dimensional aspect.   Making it all into components will remove future steps to incorporate changes into it.

I always thought about a horizontally aligned version of the control myself, just to make it look a bit more unique.  There's all sorts of stuff that could be devised I think that could still be intuitive that would be very different from the current version.

I method I've wanted to explore was a Right-click version that was Mouse centric, in that the control ended up centered on the mouse and the mouse actions were tracked as well as providing visual feed back about what was happening.  Then you would just need some sort of status display to show the current settings at any one time.

bobb




Bob Basques
GIS Systems Developer
City of Saint Paul, MN

GISmo 
Powered by
GeoMOOSE



>>> "Fischer, Brian" <bfischer at houstonengineeringinc.com> wrote:

GeoMOOSE users,

Dan and I have been talking about how to fix some of the challenges the navigation slider control has been giving us.  While this thing looks like it might be simple, it is causing us a lot of pain because of the variation in the 3 different color scheme graphics.  We are looking for some input here on how to revise the control.

Currently we have 3 graphics we can use for the control:
http://demo.openmnnd.org/geomoose/statedemo.html?skin=blue
http://demo.openmnnd.org/geomoose/statedemo.html?skin=green 
http://demo.openmnnd.org/geomoose/statedemo.html?skin=red 

This causes problems because they are all positioned on the screen different and have different graphics that make up the control.  It takes a lot of javascript and CSS code to support doing this well for 3 seperate graphics.  What we are proposing to do is migrate this to one look that will work for any color scheme.  Our initial thoughts would be to take the blue one and convert it to grey scale.  Then add some cool mouseover effects to the control.  Then change the way it behaves.  For example each tick on the slider would be set to a map scale defined by the developer in the configuration.js file.  That way it is simplier code to deal with.  Then a user can slide the zoom bar and it would snap to a tic and zoom the map to that defined scale.  Do users think this would work for them?

The other input we are looking for is if someone would want to contribute a new graphics for the slider control or has ideas for a new one.  There are a lot of other nice ones out there but the graphics are not open for us to use and distribute (i.e. google, yahoo, microsoft, mapquest, etc...).  One that I saw that I like is http://beta.whereis.com/index.htm, but once again the graphics are not available for us to use.  The only other open one we could use is the one used in OpenLayers (http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/controls.html). If anyone has a good graphic arts background maybe they could create one for us to use.  Looking for some input here.  Hopefully it all makes sense?

Thanks,
Brian

Brian Fischer, CFM
GIS Project Manager
Houston Engineering, Inc. | Leave Nothing to ChanceTM
6901 East Fish Lake Road, Suite 140
Maple Grove, MN 55369
Phone:  763.493.4522 / Fax:  763.493.5572
Email:  bfischer at houstonengineeringinc.com
Website: www.houstonengineeringinc.com 
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