90670 - color picker swatches on formatting toolbar should be popup menu not buttons

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, enhancement)

Description

[Kathleen :Brade]

The color chips on the formatting toolbar do not function smoothly.  They require 
additional clicks because they are buttons rather than popup menus.  We should 
change them to be popup menus.

Comment 1

[rubydoo123]

assigning to cmanske for disposition

Comment 2

[Charles Manske]

It is very difficult to make the buttons look like we want, and overlap the way
they do for foreground/background colors, if we make them menulists.
Also, we can't use arbitrary XUL in the <menupopup> because Mac can only do 
native menus.
We should figure out how to make the colorpicker dialog that launches position
itself just under the color button so it appears to behave like a menupopup.

Comment 3

[Kathleen :Brade]

It's important (at least to me), that I can click and drag (without releasing my 
mousebutton) to select a color.  The current color picker requires too many 
clicks to do an easy operation (set/change a color).

Comment 4

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

The two color buttons shouldn't overlap, because that gives the misleading 
impression that they are related when they are not. The first one changes the 
foreground color of the text, but the second one does not change the background 
color of the text. It changes the background color of the entire document.

It's not true that Mozilla on Mac OS cannot do XP Toolkit menus: it uses such 
menus in the Personal Toolbar in Navigator, the Fonts prefs panel, the Search 
Messages window, the Edit Filter window, and a whole bunch of other places.

Comment 5

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

*** Bug 90672 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Charles Manske]

Note that we plan to support element (e.g., <p>) background via CSS. Thus the
"underlapped" background button will be used for that purpose. The page or table
cell background will probably be a button surrounding both of existing buttons;
at least that's the current suggestion for the UI for this.

Comment 7

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

Right. See document http://www.mozilla.org/editor/adding-css-to-editor.html
section "State of the buttons and menu items".

Comment 8

[Kathleen :Brade]

Charley--can you attach an image of the layout (or provide a link with the
specification) you are proposing?

Comment 9

[Charles Manske]

*** Bug 77293 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Charles Manske]

The link Daniel supplied has an image showing the proposed UI.

Comment 11

[Kathleen :Brade]

My concern with this image/proposal
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/images/tri-state-color-button.gif
is that it's not clear to me (and possibly other users) that these colors are 
actually controls to be clicked on.  4.0 had similar issues where the color chip 
was just a box of color and didn't look like a control (in prefs UI and other 
places).

Charley--is there some way that you can make it more obvious that there are 3 
clickable popup menus?

Matthew--Did you have an alternate proposal or are you ok with this proposal?

Comment 12

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Changing the element background color will be done nowhere near often enough to
deserve a place on the toolbar. (This is possibly true for page background color
as well.) Daniel's suggestion is drawn about 40 times larger than it would be in
real life; if implemented, all three controls would be far too small to click
easily.

                                            Text      Page
                                  Size      color     color
    Block type      Typeface      popup     popup     popup
    popup menu     popup menu     menu      menu      menu
 ,-------------. ,------------. ,-------. ,-------. ,-------.
                                           _____
                                          | %%  |
+-----------------------------------------| **  |--------------- -- -
|[Paragraph  :^] [Font      :^] [Size :^] |:@@::|^] [ '' 
:^]+-----------------------------------------| MM  |--------------- -- -
                                          | ''  |
                                          | ##  |
                                          | ... |
                                           """""
The popup menu would contain the dozen most-recently-used colors (defaulting to
likely choices, such as primary/secondary colors), and the `...' item would open
the colorpicker for choosing a different color.

Comment 13

[Charles Manske]

My latest ideas for minimum change to the Composer colorpicker is closer to the
way the basic colorpicker works for the browser, 
where the array of swatches is the direct popup; then put one or 
more "recently-used" colors as another row below the main array. And we still
need an item for "Default" or "None" or "Automatic" (or whatever we come up) to
let the user remove the color attribute, resulting in default browser color.
These enhancements to the basic colorpicker for Composer should be done in XBL,
of course.
As to the problem of how to put all the different color items on the toolbar,
I have a more expansive suggestion.
I've been thinking about an "automatic popup" mechanism that lauches a simple
menu-looking list with simply a mouse-over (hover) on one simple 'color button'.
This could then have:
[ ] Text color
[ ] Text Background
[ ] Paragraph (block) background
[ ] Cell Background[ ] Table Background
[ ] Page Background

The "[ ]" would show current color state. Table items appear only win in a 
table, of course. then when you hover over each of these, the actual colorpicker
would popup to the right as a submenu does. 
Pro: The basic color picker "trigger" can look 
identical in all uses: Composer, Mail, IM, HTML Areas in Browser pages, etc.,
but which color items are supported can vary by product.
Bad: Does not show current color state on toolbar (I suppose it could be made
to do so, but I think it probably shouldn't.) It is more difficult to use as
are all submenus for some users.

Comment 14

[Syd Logan]

spam composer change

Comment 15

[Charles Manske]

Improving summary text.

Comment 16

[Charles Manske]

load balancing

Comment 17

[Charles Manske]

moving milestone

Comment 18

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

I don't like the proposal made in comment 13...

Comment 19

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

I forgot one thing : accessibility is important ; we should make sure that all
modifications of the colorpicker preserve accesibility.

Comment 20

[Charles Manske]

changing milestone. Not enough time :(

Comment 21

[R.K.Aa.]

*** Bug 147262 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 22

[Hakon]

Moving over my screenshot from bug 147262 that shows the colour picker buttons
from word processor AbiWord.
Each button is divided into two. The first applies to a selection the last used
colour, whereas the other (dropdown) opens the colour picker that lets you
choose any colour.
In my opinion, only two buttons are sufficient (text colour and "background").
If there's no cursor selection when you hit "background" it would apply to
either body bgcolor or table bgcolor. If there's a selection it would mean
paragraph bgcolor.

Comment 23

[Hakon]

Attachment: Screenshot of the colour picker in AbiWord.

Comment 24

[Syd Logan]

nsbeta1+ per buffy triage

Comment 25

[Samir Gehani]

Composer triage team: nsbeta1+/adt3

Comment 26

[jag (Peter Annema)]

-> me

Comment 27

[Kathleen :Brade]

Can we make this work like the color picker in Preferences?

I'd just tweak it to add these items if possible (at the bottom):
 "other" to popup a dialog (not required but it'd be good not to lose this)
 "default" (remove color settings)
 "last picked color"

Comment 28

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 29

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 30

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 31

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 32

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 33

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 34

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 35

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420