- A big "play" button that appears in the corner of the thumbnail when you mouse over it (Google Video style); you would click it to start the preview playing
- Simply mousing over the thumbnail starts it playing
As a result, I'd like to suggest a combination of the two approaches: when the user mouses over a non-static asset in the asset pane, they get a round play button in the corner of the clip with a "marching circles" countdown around its perimeter. If they want a preview, they can either click the button or wait for the countdown to complete. If they don't, they can clearly see how much time they have to move the mouse out of the thumbnail before the countdown expires.
The button would disappear once playback began, but only after a delay. During that time, clicking on it would have no effect. That way, the user can't "miss" if they meant to click on it to start playback but weren't quite fast enough. Other than that, clicking on a playing clip (being the usual prelude to dragging or double-clicking it) would stop it playing, as would mousing out of it.
Auditioning should probably be disabled at certain times, like when the current scene is being played back.
Oh, and one last nicety: the audio levels for loud clips should be dropped/normalized when they are auditioned so that the user doesn't accidentally blow out their eardrums when they have the volume turned up (e.g. because they are working on a stretch of animation with quiet dialogue).
5 comments:
Perhaps for the hover, it's if the mouse is still for a short duration, like half a second. This, combined with the likely delay of playage should be enough time to not be annoying. Also, since the mouse must be still (I'm thinking still relative to the pic, so scrolling would certainly restart the timer), it'd be less likely to accidentally do this once you know it can.
Hmm. Having to hold precisely still seems like it could be frustrating if you're flipping through a lot of clips trying to find the right one; in contrast to "get the mouse inside the box" it's not actually that easy to do as a repetitive action.
I suppose that's true. I think this particular issue is a TBD. The hover version is much easier to implement than the button, so we should go with the hover initially.
What about different borders around the images?
The border is clearly not belong to the image. So if its a movie it has always a lila border for example.
Another idea: a slightly bigger border and it can be have a play icon outside the thumbnail area.
Khiraly
So long as we have the countdown cue, I'm okay with just doing mouseover initially.
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