Ability to rotate molecule by clicking anywhere on screen

[Nancy-Salpepi]

Test device Dell

Operating System Windows 10

Browser Chrome

Problem description https://github.com/phetsims/qa/issues/715 https://github.com/phetsims/qa/issues/716

With the query parameter, showPointerAreas, it looks like the user should only be able to rotate the molecule by grabbing onto a terminal atom or lone pair (red highlights). However, if I click and drag on other areas of the screen, the molecule will rotate. I wasn't sure if that was intentional or not.

Visuals

Troubleshooting information: !!!!! DO NOT EDIT !!!!! Name: ‪Molecule Shapes‬ URL: https://phet-dev.colorado.edu/html/molecule-shapes/1.4.0-dev.1/phet/molecule-shapes_all_phet.html?showPointerAreas Version: 1.4.0-dev.1 2021-10-07 21:09:50 UTC Features missing: applicationcache, applicationcache, touch Flags: pixelRatioScaling User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/95.0.4638.54 Safari/537.36 Language: en-US Window: 1440x690 Pixel Ratio: 2/1 WebGL: WebGL 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 Chromium) GLSL: WebGL GLSL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0 Chromium) Vendor: WebKit (WebKit WebGL) Vertex: attribs: 16 varying: 31 uniform: 1024 Texture: size: 16384 imageUnits: 16 (vertex: 16, combined: 80) Max viewport: 16384x16384 OES_texture_float: true Dependencies JSON: {}

[arouinfar]

Thanks @Nancy-Salpepi. I think this is intentional behavior. Dragging the background rotates the molecule as a whole without temporarily altering bond angles. Grabbing the atoms will also rotate the molecule, but the user also temporarily alters the bond angle.

In general, there are limitations to what showPointerAreas will display, so there may sometimes be a mismatch between the visuals and the sim behavior. I don't think there's anything that needs to be done here, so closing.