478038 - Have secondary (arbitrary) zoom mechanism

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Panning/Zooming, defect, P1)

Description

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

Our primary zoom mechanism is double-tap to zoom, which is a structured zoom (zooms to the boundaries of the double-tapped-in area).  I've written a description of this and "arbitrary zoom" here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/UI/Designs/TouchScreen/workingUI#Zooming

that page outlines what I think we should do for arbitrary (free) zooming, given that we're designing for devices without multitouch (where pinch to zoom is the emerging convention).

We have to do this for a couple of reasons:
- structured zoom isn't always what the user is trying to do (e.g. zooming in and out within an image, for example)
- double-taps are used in a number of web-applications (e.g. gmail), so we have to provide some other way of zooming in or out when an area that makes use of double-tapping is all that's on the screen

Comment 1

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

I should point out that we have to have a mechanism for this that involves only the touchscreen.  Keyboard commands and dedicated hardware zoom buttons are great and we should use them where available, but we have to let people do this in situations where the keyboard is not displayed and where no such dedicated buttons exist.

Comment 2

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

maybe in combination with bug 476425?

Comment 3

[Jaakko Viitanen]

have a look at this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10529

one option also is to have a zoom in and zoom out UI buttons but i wouldn't recommend that. one idea could be that the bottom of the screen would have a "ruler" and draging there would zoom the page in and out.

Comment 5

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

Attachment: three options for zooming mechanism

Here are three options for an arbitrary zoom mechanism.  On future devices that can manage multitouch, the emerging pinch gesture would be best, given that it's becoming essentially a standard.  In the meantime, given that there's not widely understood gesture for zooming with one point of contact, we'll need to show something on the screen to explain what to do.  These three options all do that;  the first two put controls on the screen, whereas the third explains a gesture.

Comment 6

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I'm still not sure about the "double-tap and hold" to bring up the context overlay. I uess I like the tap-n-hold approach since it appears to be quite standard on winmo and maemo for such things.

Comment 7

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

Tap and hold is standard for "context menu" -- that's not really what we're doing here...

Comment 8

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

general consensus from an irc discussion with madhava, mark and myself was that option 3 would be best if double tap and hold was used to signal the start of a generic gesture.  This would reserve the tap and hold sequence for a future implementation of context menus.

Comment 9

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

Attachment: revised (and better!) visual for option 3

This is a better visual communication for option 3 (dialing in and out).

Comment 10

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Current zoom-by-double-click is very bad. We really need a simple way to zoom in and out - plus a way to recover from a "bad" double-click zoom.

Comment 11

[Ben Combee (:bcombee)]

Attachment: WIP patch - adds hold-to-show panel to activate zoom

I'm just posting this to record the half-day of experimentation I did for this in the bug history.

Comment 12

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Attachment: patch

Simple patch that:
* adds a popup panel for zoom in and out
* uses the pushPopup/popPopup mechanism to dismiss panel
* uses simple text buttons (not in DTD yet)

If this approach seems ok, I'll put the strings in the DTD. We could also use images for the buttons instead of text. I'd like that, but what to use for the image?

Looks like this: http://people.mozilla.com/~mfinkle/fennec/screenshots/fennec-zoom-contextpanel.png

Comment 13

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to comment #12)
> images for the buttons instead of text. I'd like that, but what to use for the
> image?

magnifying glass with a + for zoom in and - for zoom out?

Comment 14

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

n900 guideline is to _not_ use the volume +/- buttons for zooming. Since music and phone speaker can operate in the background, the recommendation is to only use volume buttons for volume.

This patch would help and it's very cheap.

Comment 15

[Stuart Parmenter]

> n900 guideline is to _not_ use the volume +/- buttons for zooming

microb continues to use volume keys

Comment 16

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to comment #15)
> > n900 guideline is to _not_ use the volume +/- buttons for zooming
> 
> microb continues to use volume keys

Not for long...


[4:40pm] mfinkle: romaxa: I notice that microb uses the volume buttons for zoom
[4:41pm] romaxa: mfinkle: yes, and it is will be fixed very soon, because people  complain about it ;)
[4:41pm] romaxa: mfinkle: we are going to disable zoom from HW keys
[4:41pm] mfinkle: oh
[4:42pm] mfinkle: so microb will _not_ zoom using the volume keys
[4:42pm] romaxa: mfinkle: because it makes youtube video playing expirience bad
[4:42pm] romaxa: mfinkle: yes, it will change volume
[4:42pm] mfinkle: romaxa: ok, I have to go request blocking on a different bug again
[4:42pm] mfinkle: romaxa: thanks for the update!
[4:43pm] mfinkle: romaxa: how will the mircob zoom then?
[4:43pm] romaxa: mfinkle: I got this info, and spec change only today ;) you are twice lucky ;)
[4:43pm] romaxa: mfinkle: only, swirl zoom, and block zoom

Comment 18

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

We are adding CTRL+up (zoom in) and CTRL+down (zoom out)

Comment 19

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Attachment: patch (ctrl+up and ctrl+down)

Simple patch that uses ctlr+up and ctrl+down shortcut keys to zoom in and out

The keys simply call the commands for zoom in and zoom out (the same used for the volume keys on the n810). Those commands don't try to scroll the content to try to keep the center point in the center of the screen. That would be nice.

Comment 20

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Attachment: patch 2

Last patch had a bad change

Comment 21

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

pushed:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mobile-browser/rev/2f2ec0256c7e

Comment 22

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

verified FIXED On builds:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l; en-US; rv:1.9.2b1pre) Gecko/20091026
Fennec/1.0b5pre

and

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv6l; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091026
Fennec/1.0b5pre

Comment 24

[zimon]

As I wrote in  Bug 533560 it is difficult to use CTRL UP/DOWN in Scandinavian version of N900. (Yesterday I thought it is impossible, but maybe after some upgrades it became somewhat "possible".) One has to press 3 buttons at the same time.

CTRL UP/DOWN is not a good choice and it isn't even working on desktop Firefox. CTRL +/- would be as difficult in Scandinavian N900 keyboards and that would be at least the same as in the dekstop Firefox.

I propose CTRL I would be zoom in, and CTRL O would be zoom out.
(I humbly would ask this change also to dekstop Firefox, and in fact to every GUI-software in the world.)

What does it even mean to add/subtract (+/-), or go UP/DOWN in zoom?
Do you go closer, or do you take more height from the surface of the map for example?
However, zoom in (CTRL I) and zoom out (CTRL O) does not have ambiguous contradicting meanings. 

IN/OUT are internationally well known words. Even people who do not really speak english, knows what is IN and OUT.

Fortunately also, I and O are side by side in a QWERTY-keyboard. One could quickly switch between IN/OUT to get a desired zoom level. 
In minimal QWERTY-keyboards, there is often only one CTRL-key and it is located on the left side of the keyboard. 'I' and 'O' are on the right side - we are lucky again, one could zoom in and out using just two thumbs.

Zooming, as the clipboard (CTRL A/X/C/V), is an important GUI tool, so it deserves to have keyboard shortcuts in CTRL <A-Z> area of the keyboard map?  CTRL I for zoom in and CTRL O for zoom out, are like meant to be, like made in heaven when QWERTY-keybord was invented.