Sometimes, one click is not enough to toggle a properties switch

Dorico
#1

Dear Team, dear fellow Doricians,

I know I already talked about this problem, a long time ago (and was not able to find this to post under it). I thought that the problem would disappear with new versions (and new Qt versions), but I still find myself wasting time clicking twice on buttons that should be clicked once. Of course, this is not a major issue, but it’s an annoying one, and since nobody talks about it, I am wondering if this problem is only with my machine… Of course, it’s not about clicking too far away from the toggle button. I could not find a pattern, it happens sometimes, and sometimes it’s working flawlessly. I would love to post a video showing it, but given the random nature of that problem, I do not have time to create it.
Anyway, maybe one of you has the same problem and has a video or a pattern to exhibit that glitch?

#2

I’ve noticed something along these lines: I wasn’t sure if I just wasn’t being precise enough.

#3

HI Marc,

If I recall correctly, I think the team are onto this. I was left with the impression that they would be looking at improving things.

For my part, I find the toggle buttons very fiddly. More often than not I have to click a couple of times (or more) to turn them on or off. Inevitably a little bit more time is wasted because the first thing I do is check whether I’ve actually got what I want selected properly - it usually is and then I’m back to fiddling with the button to get it to work. I am running Dorico in a very high resolution (3870 x 2160) - so I’m not exactly making life easy for myself, but even on a 43" screen the property switches are tiny. I’ve been working on the basis that the area of focus for a toggle button is very restricted, but now that you mention it, I’m often getting it to work and thinking “didn’t I just click there?”. I’ve just been assuming I did it wrong but maybe you’re right and there is a glitch.

I’d like to see them just a bit bigger, or the area of focus a bit bigger, and have the mouse pointer changing to let you know you have focus on the button (as is the case with the arrows in the Setup Mode Player list).

#4

Well, David,
Since I wrote this thread, it only happened once. But I can assure you I was right on spot, and I had to click three times at the same exact place to toggle the switch. Once in a hour of work is not much, but it sometimes happens more often.

#5

I noticed the same problem. I’m using the fingering options often, mostly placing them outside the slurs, and have to click sometimes 3 times to get the switch to change.

#6

Thank you, Andre, Ben and David. So I guess this is not about me or my machine (which, by the way, I changed two months ago, so I should write my machines).
The reproduce pattern thing is still missing to help our dream team solve this. Does it only happen on mac ?

#7

Can’t say I ever noticed it on Windows…

#8

Having the same issues on Mac.

I always felt it rather happened when I was moving my mouse while or instantly after clicking.
My impression was that the actual click command is sent with a slight delay, and my mouse didn’t properly hover over the toggle anymore.

But I agree it’s very annoying, because I usually don’t let my mouse rest on the toggle until it’s confirmed switched.

#9

I’ve noticed it on Windows but it’s weird, as sometimes it doesn’t toggle at all, and sometimes it seems like it will toggle twice. I’ll see the toggle light up and then it goes off again like I’ve double-clicked it, when I’ve only single-clicked. The boundary regions for the toggles don’t seem quite symmetrical either. I can click a few pixels above a toggle and it will still work, but if I click exactly at the bottom of a toggle it won’t. There’s plenty of space between toggles, so I’d really like to see the boundary region expanded a few pixels in either direction, but especially below as there doesn’t really seem to be any boundary extension there at all.

#10

Same problem here, also on high resolution. Working in Windows 10.

For me the problem is frequent, I would almost say general. I always assumed it had something to do with an extremely small response area for mouse clicks, at least in toggle buttons in the lower pane. I don’t seem to have the problem anywhere else.

#11

Well, I guess I’ll pile on and say, “Good to know it wasn’t just me imagining things”! :wink:

#12

They’re using Qt and the input handling is platform dependent (Win/Mac) obviously. Windows input can get crazy, basically the input goes flying around the system to whoever is interesting, and depending on how what that part decides to do with it interesting things can happen.

But in this case I suspect the problem is simply that they opted for a small widget footprint to give them maximum space, because the UI is so dense with controls. On high DPI this could become problematic I can see, I don’t have the problem (though I might have seen it once) with my large pixels. Most platforms simply have a “High DPI” option in settings which usually scales up text. In this case it could scale the controls. Or, they could keep the controls the same size but have a larger invisible “landing pad” for each of them (which would be tedious to set up).

#13

Thanks for the new “Windows” inputs. Again, I am really positive on that point, I do not move the mouse between clicks. It works ok most of the time, but sometimes, I have to click again. And sometimes again and again. Nice to know I’m not alone on this one; has anyone from the team noticed that behavior?

#14

Sometimes when I click on a switch, it will toggle on and immediately turn off again. If I click it again, it will stay on. It’s almost as through the UI thinks it’s receiving two clicks the first time. It happens pretty rarely, but it does occasionally happen. I have always thought the reason this happened was because I was somehow clicking right on the edge of the control bounding box, where a single click might be interpreted as a click inside the bounding box, then outside the box, then inside the box again. Careful re-aiming usually does the trick, but this doesn’t explain what Marc is experiencing.

#15

Well, I’m not sure it’s not related to what I describe. It certainly happened to me like that too. But now that I am aware of it and try to understand whether there’s a pattern, I made sure I did not move the cursor when it does not work, and clicking again does work. Not sure that helps to track down that glitch, though.

#16

I do confirm the clicking problem on Mac. If the team is on the problem, might as well spend time eliminating superfluous buttons. Some things like inputting a fourth harmonic needs four clicks, if I remember well (not on the computer now). When working on score loaded with these, it gets very tedious. Anyway, it’s not a high priority problem, just fine tuning to get it even more efficient.

#17

I agree that the active click area for these slide switch controls is smaller than it would ideally be. Those slide switches used, in earlier versions of Dorico, to show a hand pointer when you hovered over them, but it would show the hand pointer in positions where the click would be inoperable, which was almost more annoying. So we changed that behaviour such that the controls don’t change the pointer, and we find that this helps a bit, since you’re not encouraged to click in a spot where the control definitely won’t activate. But, nevertheless, it’s certainly fiddlier than we would like to activate these switches, and it’s something we will attempt to address at some point.

#18

Thanks Daniel. But this is not exactly the behavior I am describing — I remember you gave me the same explanation the first time I mentioned it, which is why I am paying extra attention to where the pointer is when the click does not toggle the switch. It does not fit either the behavior described by others (one click behaves as a double click that toggles on and off, which I certainly have experienced too). I was hoping you would have experienced this too, but it might be related with the use of extra hardware (apple bt trackpad here).

#19

Daniel: the active click area is not smaller: it’s in the wrong place!

If I move the pointer below a Property switch, such as Playback end offset, and incrementally move up by the smallest unit, and click: the switch will not activate until it’s about half way up the switch.

If I come down on the switch from above, I can activate the switch while clicking above it…! It’s as if the active area is half its height further up than the switch.

#20

This happens to me as well. Sometimes I have to click it several times to get the click to “take.”