[mythtv] [mythtv-commits] Ticket #10045: Prevent looping in button list when less than three buttons

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Sun, 2011-09-18 at 16:10 +0100, Xavier Hervy wrote:
> On 18/09/11 15:42, John P Poet wrote:
> > Would it not be better just to "fix" the offending themes, so it is
> > obvious which button is selected?
> The problem does not come from the theme but from my brain :(
> The themes show a difference between the selected button and the others 
> but If there is only two buttons on the list, I have to remember that 
> the grey text it the selected one and the white one is not selected 
> (default theme).
> When there is more than two buttons, I know that only one have the 
> focus, so that ok.
> With only two, there is no need to loop anyway so...

I don't like this for the reason Robert mentioned. It makes the list
behave differently based on the number of items in the list. This is
not the usual behaviour of lists in any other UI context the user will
be familiar with so it would be something we are teaching our users to
do. This makes the burden on it's usefulness higher than average. In
this case I think the theme is to blame. Normally a selected button is
brighter than an unselected button so the theme is forcing the user to
learn something new and opposite to expectation so the burden on it's
usefulness is higher than average. Assuming making the selected button
subdued doesn't have some huge benefit here it should be made to conform
to standard user interface conventions.

-- Daniel