::scr User Interface Problem - Probably Anal

[Greg McCarroll]

Let me set the scene, I have a directory ~/wallpaper/ that has several
top level categories - Anime, Scenery, etc. in it and I also have a
little script that currently chooses a category and then displays a
different image from that category on my two linux desktops (See 
http://www.mccarroll.org.uk/~gem/screenshots/ for examples).

Note - Currently the wallpaper category selection is weighted by the
number of images in that category, this will become important later
on.

This is all well and good, however sometimes I'd like to be able to
influence the choice of category a little, but not entirely. I can
also see myself wanting to do this with MP3 selection. For instance If
I'm a little stressed out, I might up the weighting on Scenic
wallpapers on my wallpaper influencer tool and also up the weighting
on Classical on my mp3 influencer tool.

So, it all seems quite simple, I write a tiny (desktop space) GTk app
with a couple of slider bars, one for each category and I can
influence each categories selection.

Now is where it gets a little bit anally retentive in some peoples
eyes and maybe interesting in the eyes of others.

What scales do I use on them?

I could treat them as a multiplier and go from 0 to 2, with 1 in the
middle of the bar. However this seems a little bit lopsided to me as
the effect of multiplying by 0 compared to multiplying by 2 seems a
little uneven. I supposed I could go higher than 2, but where do you
stop? Well 11 obviously, because it is louder than 10.

So, I thought a little more, and I thought why don't I make them all
go from 0 to 1, but make their settings always add up to 1 (or 100%
for the arts students out there), which is great, as i add to some I
can see the others drop. I could even add a lock option that meant one
category's weight would be locked and wouldn't change based on the
movement of the other sliders.

At this stage I was quite happy, but then I thought some more and I
started to think about my weighting by images in the category, see I
told you this would be important (for some values of important). To
represent this I could set the initial weightings based on the file
totals of the categories - however at this stage I was just dealing
with raw numbers, I have no abstraction and I was hence no longer
happy.

I went on to think about going for tactic 2 and also generating a
little pie-chart, and let it take into consideration the files in
categories weighting, but i think this is probably overkill.

So am I thinking too much about this? Or is there a really clever way
to design a UI to deal with this? 

Greg

-- 
Greg McCarroll                         http://www.mccarroll.org.uk/~gem/
                                   jabber://greg@jabber.mccarroll.org.uk