I often have a huge map sat on an external display, which I can comfortably pan around using trackpad gestures without needing to give focus to that window - this makes it incredibly useful as an exploratory interface while I’m typing away in something else.
However, as it’s a huge map, I also need to zoom in and out. The pinch and expand gestures though seem to require focus for Tinderbox to pick them up. Would it be possible to enable these gestures without needing focus? Safari supports this, so I suspect it’s not a weird exception that panning exclusively works without focus.
I also appreciate that when I say focus I mean clicking the window so it’s active first: I appreciate, when actually writing the gnarly code to make these seemingly trivial features work, that focus and active may be different things.
Tinderbox always feels like very tactile software, the map feels very sculptural to work in - adornments are great for structuring and organising loose intuitive connections. Part of my request is so I can leave a map view as a passive information display on a second screen, and being able to scoot around an overview, then to zoom in on details in a cluster would be really useful. Clicking and moving focus, even briefly, can be contextually rough on a mac, particularly when it involves moving between two applications split over two screens.
Ah, that a shame to hear. Thanks for investigating it though, Mark! Is it worth pushing requests from users to Apple to make it possible to zoom as well as pan in applications easier, or is it a deeply baked-in aspect of the interaction model that’s unlikely to change?
It’s probably worth it, though Apple is very large.
The underlying issue is that you don’t want an application covertly monitoring what you’re doing in other applications. An application has to receive mouse clicks in its windows, even when that application is in the background; mouse clicks are the way you activate a background application. But other events are sent only to active applications.
There is a loophole: the Accessibility settings let applications request permission to do mildly insecure things in order to oblige people with limited vision or motor control. Registering for Accessibility permissions is tricky, and in the process Apple displays scary warnings. In some cases, if you obey those warnings, Apple locks the door and throws away the key, and you need to do even more scary things in Terminal to restore the system and try again.
So, we could do it, but it might not work terribly well, and it would be difficult for people to set up. Apple could make it easy, or easier.