SpreadsheetUI : Use ContextTracker

[johnhaddon]

This lets us highlight the currently active row like so :

There is ample room for bikeshedding on the presentation, and opinions are welcome, but I am pretty sold on "context yellow" as a way of tying together all the upcoming context-aware features and linking with the existing colour for the current-frame indicator. @tomc-cinesite had some concerns that it could be confused for a warning, but in context I think it works pretty well, and used sparingly yellow works well to draw the eye without overwhelming. I don't know what other colour we'd use.

Tom also suggested a few alternative presentations, which I've tried out below...

Adding an "overline" to the underline

To avoid any ambiguity about what the underline is associated with. I don't mind this one, but I'm not sure the underlining is too ambiguous, especially once you've seen it update in context once or twice.

Using background colour

I strongly dislike this on two counts :

• We're overloading background colour already, using it differentiate both even/odd rows and also disabled cells.
• When faded to a suitable luminance for the background, the colour just gets muddy.

Using left/right lines

I find this much harder to read than any other presentation. Note that we do need to highlight the left/right of every cell rather than just the row ends, because disabled cells don't get highlighting.

[tomc-cinesite]

Thanks for exploring those presentations @johnhaddon. With you on your conclusion (though I might perhaps not mind the background one, if we werent using that in so many other ways already...)

The only other mystery option 'e' I could think of was something like:

[johnhaddon]

The only other mystery option 'e' I could think of was something like

I tried something similar to that, highlighting the existing "vertical header" boxes on the left hand side. Aesthetically I think it's fine, but I think it also has a couple of downsides. It doesn't read as easily as the other options for very wide spreadsheets, because the indicator may be far from the cells you are looking at. And it might also be construed to mean that disabled cells are active, whereas the absence of underlining on those hopefully makes it clear that they're not :

[tomc-cinesite]

I tried something similar to that, highlighting the existing "vertical header" boxes on the left hand side. Aesthetically I think it's fine, but I think it also has a couple of downsides. It doesn't read as easily as the other options for very wide spreadsheets, because the indicator may be far from the cells you are looking at. And it might also be construed to mean that disabled cells are active, whereas the absence of underlining on those hopefully makes it clear that they're not :

Yeah, I guess it depends on how much you want to re-enforce the activeness. The implemented version looks good 👍

[murraystevenson]

Thanks John! Changes look good to me.

Given the options on this jaunt around the bike shed, I'm also happiest with the original underline. It seems the option with the least downsides and once we start incorporating "context yellow" elsewhere in the UI its purpose should become a bit more obvious...