think-cell technical report TC2003/01 A GUI-based Interaction ...

4.3 Specifying the User Interface INTERACTION CONCEPT
(a) User interaction . . . (b) . . . and the resulting layout
Figure 28: In clone mode, an entire composition of shapes can be duplicated in a
single interaction without the need to explicitly select those shapes.
(a) User interaction . . . (b) . . . and the resulting layout (after update
by solver)
Figure 29: In combination with the solver, the clone mode is especially convenient
to insert entire rows or columns into tables that are built from single shapes.
4.3.3 Selecting Smart Elements
The selection of elements is a part of the user interface that is not primarily targeted
at handling the smart grid. However, it is an important part of the select-and-modify
pattern (cf. Sect. 4.2.5) and therefore we will have a look at some new ideas for
selection, which I realized in my software.
First of all, the PowerPoint way to select elements is supported. This includes
the exclusive selection of the element that is visible at the mouse cursor position
when the left mouse button is clicked without any modifier keys, removing any
selections from other elements. When shift is held down for the same action, the
selection is toggled for the element at the mouse cursor position, leaving all other
selections unaffected. There’s a third way to select one or multiple elements in
PowerPoint: Starting a drag-and-drop action on a part of the slide where there is
no element, creates a lasso. The lasso is a rectangular screen area that serves as a
bounding box for the elements to select. All elements that are spatially enclosed
by the lasso are selected. Also, the shift key can be used to toggle the selection of
elements that are captured by the lasso.
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