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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

And yet another control that pretends to be a dropdown box, but isn't. No. I'm not complaining about the appearance or the fact that it has a search field while the real dropdown doesn't.

I'm complaining about the way it responds to mouse actions: The real dropdown box, on my machine, expands the menu on mouse down after a no-doubt OS-specific delay. The fake dropdown doesn't - it only reacts on mouse up.

Of course, you can't make a a control work exactly like its native counterpart - but that IMHO just means that you shouldn't even try imitating them and provide its own unique look.

I really dislike nearly-native controls - they feel wrong to me.

But don't get me wrong: The controls are really cool and incredibly useful. If only they didn't try to mimic the native look without quite matching it.

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Looks fantastic, but here's another feature it doesn't have which makes it feel less native.

Try mouse scrolling too far whilst the menu's options are open/visible. The parent page scrolls as well when you reach the start/end. This doesn't happen with a normal select menu.

I wonder if there's a way to do an event.preventDefault() on the mouse scroll event when reaching the end of the list?

FF on Mac actually tries to do something clever here. It won't start scrolling the page itself until after a small delay or until you move the mouse.

That's exactly what i found but on the whole I give it a thumbs up.

Not just looks, it solves certain big usability problems I have with regular selects or checkboxes for values. However the few non-native problems are indeed problematic. We got brainpower here, lets make it work!

"no-doubt OS-specific delay" - on Windows, this delay is a factor of the double-click speed. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2008/04/23/84175...

Reminds me vaguely of the uncanny valley[1]. Not a perfect analog, as nearly-human forms seem to elicit a particularly strong and emotive response. I also do wonder to what extent, and for whom, this is true. (i.e., are power users more or less aggravated? When do people change from disliking the new FB chat window to being familiar enough with it to dislike it when you change it again?)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

My problem with this is that when I see the box (e.g. Multiple Select), I perceive it as a text input. I'd be ill-surprised to discover on a site to (all of a sudden) have this protruding box appear out of nowhere.

Better solution: on mouse click, hide the box. Only show the box for autocompletes.

When we do this (with jQueryUI) we add the little down arrow button decoration so you expect the dropdown to appear.

Hmm, it definitely is a learned experience. Some form of affordance here would really help clarify what will happen. You could add some placeholder text that says something like "click to add items", but that seems a bit like "turn knob to open door."

I agree it's not ideal, but I think the majority of users have seen less friendly versions of this. The concept is Token Input. Facebook uses it in places, and they don't have the placeholder text that says "Choose..." when nothing is selected. I think the placeholder text ought to help quite a bit.

this. a tag text input even.

Was testing it out on our homepage. Noticed a couple of bugs as well:

http://teaspiller.com

The search for "Tax" yields result, but nothing for "Estates". I think it doesn't work for first word if the term contains a space.

EDIT: was testing on Firefox 5, works on Opera. Bug filed: https://github.com/harvesthq/chosen/issues/50

I'm trying to understand your point of view, but I'm a bit confused about something (I'm probably just completely misunderstanding it). In the context of select boxes, it seems like the only advantage of mouse-down activation vs mouse-up is that you could click, hold, "drag" to your selection, and release. This would only be advantageous if your selection is near the top.

The problem isn't that opening on mouse-up is worse, it's that it's different. After using an operating system for thousands of hours, one becomes accustom to the behavior of the standard controls. Anything that deviates from them and is not in widespread use - even if it is technically an improvement - will feel uncomfortable and "wrong".

In some cases, like upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion or Windows XP to Windows 7, the users adapt to the change. This is not likely to happen for a Javascript contro that is not in use on any major sites.

It's also far worse than a standard dropdown for mobile.

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