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A tier can be made to disappear by clicking the little grey - box on it's left. When it is gone the box will change to a + to let the user make it reappear. This can also be done by invoking the widget's pop up menu with a right mouse click. The little boxes may well be going away as they are no longer needed and cause a bit of difficulty with the zoom focus and glyph selection. A click on the button also gets passed through to the map below.
Border Adjustment
Adjust a border between two tiers. Dragging a border up should shrink the tier above and expand the tier below. Dragging it down should expand the tier above and shrink the one below. All other tiers should remain unaffected. No scrolling is instigated. The axis (or Coordinates) tier cannot be resized. If a border of the "Coordinates" tier is dragged then the tiers above the coordinates or axis tier and below it are resized.
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Tier Border Change. The border between the top two tiers has been adjusted. |
Moving a Tier (Shuffling)
A user can move a tier over others by grabbing it in the middle (not the border) with the mouse and dragging it vertically. When dropped the tier will take a new position in the stack of tiers and other tiers will be pushed down (or up) to accommodate the dropped tier's new position. All tiers retain their pre drag height. Scrolling is not instigated. Maybe it should be.
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Moving a Tier. The central tier has been moved up and swapped with the one that was above it. |
Automatic Resizing
When the window height changes the tiers resize to fit.
Future Possibilities
- Scrolling a Single Tier - An alternative to stretching a single tier to fit the vertical space might be to leave it at a fixed size and add a scroll bar when the height of the tier's display exceeds that allocated.
- Zooming a Single Tier Vertically - A single tier might be "zoomable" somehow. Note that this requires scrolling when zoomed in past the point where the entire tier can be seen at once.
- Expanding a Single Tier Vertically - Manipulating a border between two tier labels as above could have other behaviors.
- For a single tier being expanded or shrunk we could provide a way to toggle the shrink to fit behavior if the tier.
- Instead of shrinking one tier and expanding the other, one tier could be shrunk or expanded and all the other tiers retain their hight and just be moved up or down in the panel.
- Or one tier could be directly shrunk or expanded and all other tiers shrunk or expanded in response keeping the overall height of the containing scene fixed. Think of an accordeon pleat being manipulated and all the other pleats reacting by making or taking space with the ends of the accordeon remaining fixed.
Single-track Stretch
However, sometimes Sometimes it would be useful to be able to stretch-zoom tracks independently of each other, i.e., increase the relative height of one track while compressing the remaining tracks by equal amounts.
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