EyeDropperColorChooserPanel

Notes/API for Internal Review

Concept

The EyeDropperColorChooserPanel is a new panel for JColorChoosers. It allows the user to drag a magnifying glass anywhere on the screen to grab a color. It has essentially no API because it merely implements the abstract methods in AbstractColorChooserPanel.

Known issues:

First of all, the current implementation uses Matisse and therefore GroupLayout. We seem to have a policy against using external layout managers so this may need to be converted to GridBagLayout.

Second, the current implementation is not ideal from a usability perspective and is difficult to fix without new core JDK APIs.

• Because there is no way to get a system wide glasspane the user cannot simply click on a point on the screen to select it. Instead the user must drag the glass from the chooser to the color they wish to choose and then release the mouse button. This is not intuitive and requires explanatory text in the panel. Once a system wide glasspane is available this would become a viable option. Possibly creating a screenwide frame containing a screenshot of the desktop would be another option.

• The user does the selection using the normal mouse cursor rather than, say, a magnifying glass cursor. There is no API to set a mouse cursor that works screen wide rather than just over a particular component. A bug in the JRE has been filed againsted this.

• The user must look back at the color chooser to see a magnified version of what they are hovering over. It would be better to have some sort of floating magnifying window next to or beneath the mouse cursor.

Reference API as HTML:

• Source Code
• Source Code 2nd version

• There is nothing wrong with the API (since it has none) but there are usability concerns. It is hard to review this component without a runnable demo. Also, there are several possible ways to implement this given the constraints of native hooks in Java 5. It has been suggested that we add a JNLP and some screenshots.
• It is recommended that we build demos of several different interaction methods to compare them.

Feedback from External Review (forum link goes here):

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