FileZilla has a great tool tips response of about half a second.
Using the latest Slicer Preview for today the tooltip delay is slight for the first one, but is pretty quick on that order of a half second as I proceed over others.
The tooltip delay indeed feels long, something like 2 seconds, but I recorded a screen capture video and it actually really is just 0.7 seconds (this value is set in the default application style). If tooltip is displayed for any of the buttons, then the tooltip is displayed immediately for all other buttons (until the moue pointer leaves the area).
Time improvement that we can get out of eliminating tooltip delay is negligible. The best we could achieve by removing the tooltip delay would be to shave off 0.7 seconds from finding a toolbar button. This is not much, because finding a toolbar button by iterating through every button using the mouse pointer is a very slow way of finding a button: it takes about 5-10 seconds in total. I donāt think it is worth changing the default tooltip delay for this marginal benefit. Most of the time we regret when we try to be smarter than everyone else and override such default behaviors.
We should think about solutions that allow newcomers to learn the effect icons faster (how they look and/or where they are).
- Having nicer icon would help for sure. Iām working on making the icons rendered crisper, with more details, but I donāt have a talent for drawing nice icons. Could anybody help with designing nice icons?
- Showing the button labels is really easy. However, Iām not sure how it could be configured on the GUI in a way that users can find but does not cause clutter. Any suggestions?
- Any other ideas for providing training wheels for new users that can be easily taken away?
I think having improved icons for Segment Editor module appears to be an agreed upon good task. Should we create a new discourse post explaining the current look of icons and then we can brainstorm ideas for new icons based on what other applications have to explain the similar type action?
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A post was split to a new topic: Move effects from SegmentEditorExtraEffects into Slicer core
For me it is not so much the slowness, but the tooltips are actually kind of small to read. Is it possible to increase the size a bit more (without affecting the other tooltips)?
Completed. See below
Can you show a screenshot? Have you set a larger font in Slicer application settings (scaled the Slicer font in application settings / Appearance / Font and size) or adjusted the application scaling settings in your operating system or in your environment variables?
I am using the default font size in Slicer (10 pts). When my laptop screen set to 1920x1080 and font scaling in windows is 100% (which is recommended for that resolution) this is what I see:
When I switch to 3840x2160 resolution (which is the native display for this laptop), and use 250% scaling (again recommended by windows) this is what I see:
So definitely better with the scaling and higher DPI. I can stick with that. I used the lower resolution for some other applicationsā¦
Could I just add that I did some segmentations today with the new vertical toolbar and I am quite lost without the button labels. The problem with tooltips is that you need to scan through several of the buttons to find what you need.
But maybe I am just not the icon type of guy ā¦
The idea is that you visually recognize the buttons because the appearance and layout of the toolbar is always the same. Reading tooltips should be the last resort.
Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Gimp, PhotoShop, ITK-Snap, Mimics, etc. do not display labels (maybe for a few, or for button groups). Iāve only found that Paint is the one that adds more labels, but still more than half of the buttons are not labeled. I donāt think that everybody else is doing it wrong by not displaying labels. It might be that the effect icons are not easy enough to recognize, or maybe there is something else.
Can you give examples of software that display labels next to toolbuttons?
How do you use all the software that do not display labels next to toolbuttons? Do you always rely on the tooltip? Or you can recognize those icons more easily?
I am using the new toolbar, while I am fond of it, it does take some getting used to (like any change).
But the significance of this change is the predictable of the position of effects/tools. With the labels, it all depended on how wide your screen was, how big the module panel etc, whether you have 2, 3, or 4 rows of effects. Here the order will always stay the same, once you are used their positions, you will not need to search for them.
In Pixinsight, an astromical image processing software that is packed with functions, the user can call all from a menu but can save these to modules to the desktop, move them, order, or group them according for each workflow. This is your personal project space which may span many screens.
This seems like a visual pipeline editor and not a toolbar. It is justified to have labels in this case because number and location of the blocks is not static (so it would impossible to find tools by visual memory) and you have huge amount of space.
A post was split to a new topic: Adjust segment opacity in Segment Editor
To follow up here, @rbumm has proposed PR ENH: Add ability to toggle segment editor tool button style by rbumm Ā· Pull Request #6070 Ā· Slicer/Slicer Ā· GitHub to re-enable the ability to show the Segment Editor Effect name on the buttons because of the concerns he raised previously in this thread.
Originally it was thought to toggle Effect text on the buttons by keyboard shortcut. @pieper brought an idea to show the effect text when the active effect was āNoneā and then to hide it when selecting an effect. This was implemented in the PR and is shown in the video below.
It appears this proposed design doesnāt help maintain Segment Editor Effect buttons location on screen as clicking an effect button then moves that effect button elsewhere on screen in addition to the other effects.
It was previously discussed above in this thread about other applications not displaying labels for many tool editing buttons. That also Slicerās Segment Editor effect would generally benefit from improved icons for recognizability.
Itās unclear from current brainstorming how showing buttons labels will be possible in a way that does not cause clutter.
How about a single widget that shows a panel on mouse hovering? That panel would contain all buttons with associated text. Is it a fundamental requirement that all effects be permanently displayed ?
The slice widgets for one already does that :
Else, it could be like the preset combobox of āVolume renderingā, one that groups choices, expecting only one choice, the text of which is shown when selected.
I think a design requirement is for quick selection between multiple effects as it is common to use multiple effects to manipulate a segment rather than generally only using one effect.
So whether effects in a pop up widget or in a QComboBox, that would increase the number of actions (mouse hover or mouse clicks) to switch between effects which is undesirable.
There is logic internally to the widget that allows setting which effects are displayed to enable essentially āfavoriteā effects and to hide effects that might not be used in certain custom applications. That could probably allow 1 column of effect buttons with effect name text shown in a manner that isnāt cluttered. However for Slicer core, a design of showing all the effects as the ādefaultā design would be the better design for a majority of Slicer users.
segmentEditorWidget = slicer.modules.segmenteditor.widgetRepresentation().self().editor
segmentEditorWidget.setEffectColumnCount(1)
segmentEditorWidget.setEffectNameOrder(["None", "Threshold", "Paint", "Draw", "Erase"])
segmentEditorWidget.unorderedEffectsVisible=False
Thanks for experimenting with this @jamesobutler . The experiment you did with the āNoneā effect showing the names of the effects is exactly what I was thinking. I still like it, but I guess others can weigh in too. It doesnāt bother me that the buttons get smaller. What used to bother me about the old Segment Editor flow-layout toolbar was when buttons moved from, say, the end of one row to the start of the row below and you had to hunt for them. Here they stay int he same places, just bigger and smaller.
If making the labels come and go with the None effect is too visually jarring, then a little checkbox to control label visibility also makes sense, along with the hotkey as suggested by @rbumm .