0

I'm designing a canvas based software with pickable objects. User interaction is performed by a custom state machine based system. I need to specify the selection process, but I need some recommendations or best practices on how users should pick objects. As a requierement I need to implement selection by LeftMouseDown and multiselection by Ctrl + LeftMouseDown. For example: in Windows 8 OS, selection of desktop icons are performed on LeftMouseDown, but multiselection is performed on LeftMouseUp (I don't know why). Are there any description of the processes or state machines that controls the user interaction with mouse picking of objects on a standard basis?.

Jonathan Olavarría
  • 75
  • 6
  • 1
    Multiselection in that case works on MouseUp probably just so as to let the copy feature to work: if you move the mouse before releasing the button when Ctrl is pressed you initiate a copy – gbr Jul 16 '15 at 17:33

1 Answers1

0

There's a pretty thorough chapter on selections in the 1999 "Microsoft® Windows® User Experience", see here.

I don't know if there's a more recent document or if that chapter's material is available somewhere on-line.

gbr
  • 1,264
  • 8
  • 27
  • Thanks, this is what I was searching for: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa511258.aspx – Jonathan Olavarría Jul 20 '15 at 15:50
  • @JonathanOlavarría Thanks for the link, maybe you'll get me to finally get up to date :) . The book I referred you to has still some additional material, but it's mostly obsolete stuff that you can probably do without. By the way, you should probably post your comment as the accepted answer rather than accepting mine – gbr Jul 20 '15 at 16:50