CurveManipulationWidthSlider PointerArea along track seems too small

phetsims / calculus-grapher

"Calculus Grapher" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.

GNU General Public License v3.0

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CurveManipulationWidthSlider PointerArea along track seems too small #282

Closed marlitas closed 1 year ago

marlitas commented 1 year ago

For https://github.com/phetsims/calculus-grapher/issues/268, I was examining the sim with showPointerAreas and noticed that I received a pointer along a very narrow portion of the track, so narrow that it would rapidly flip between cursor and pointer. This seems buggy, and may be a problem with Slider, as I did not see code in CurveManipulationWidthSlider that dictated pointer area.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/42476338/224839893-5f7ba058-1383-4bae-8b50-9eafe62c5915.mov

pixelzoom commented 1 year ago

The default Slider track is sized via SliderOptions.trackSize, and the cursor changes only when it's over the track. There's currently no option for dilating the default track's pointer area.

CurveManipulationWidthSlider.ts is setting a very narrow trackSize, which explains the behavior that you're seeing:

      trackSize: new Dimension2( 100, 1 ),

If I make this change:

-      trackSize: new Dimension2( 100, 1 ),
+      trackSize: new Dimension2( 100, 3 ),
+      trackFillEnabled: 'black',

then the track looks too "heavy":

I'll investigate adding options for dilation of track pointer areas to SliderOptions. But I'm hesitant to add more complexity to Slider, especially for a feature like this that I suspect is seldom used/discovered.

pixelzoom commented 1 year ago

Adding options to Slider is not going to happen, see gory details in https://github.com/phetsims/sun/issues/836.

My recommendation is "won't fix" for Calculus Grapher. But I'll let @amanda-phet make the final call. To summarize:

The slider track in Calculus Grapher is very narrow, but looks good. But that means that's it difficult to click in the track.
Making the slider track wider makes it look too heavy, and is not really much of an improvement on being able to click in the track.
Adding options to Slider to adjust the tracks pointer areas is a major project, so it's not going to happen for Calculus Grapher.

amanda-phet commented 1 year ago

I think we should not make any changes to the slider for this sim. I didn't even know the slider was clickable! Even so, making it thicker makes it look worse visually and still doesn't make the touch area acceptable.

If we want a larger touch area, it should be handled in Slider and not in this sim.