Overloaded radio buttons -- good GUI design?

Question

I don't know where else to ask this. What do you think about overloading radio buttons with multiple functions? I have made an update to my Interactive Color Wheel that uses this technique. I haven't released it yet, but it is available here:
* http://r0k.us/rock/Junk/SIHwheel.html
It offers eight different sorts of 1567 colors and their names. That seemed to me to be way too many radio buttons; there were originally just three sorts and three buttons. I made a second row that contains the five new sorts accessed via two buttons. The sorts on each button are closely related, riffs on a theme if you will. Consecutive clicks on one of these two buttons will rotate through its functions, with the button text and toolTip updated to match its current sort and state.
I won't try describing more -- just use it, and let me know what you think. Intuitive? Ugly? Bad GUI design? Other comments?

Answer 1

RichF wrote:
Don't forget to take Spot, the Magic Color Dog for a walk! I recommend a different sort than the default [alphabetically], but you can change sorts on the fly. (Try [by hue], or one of the three Hilbert sorts.) In fact, Spot isn't stopping you from doing anything. Well, you'd have to have him go really slow to type in a hex color.
I was really, really amazed how fast Spot can run. With the gauge fully to the right, the timer has a specified delay of 0, so he's running as fast as everything else in the program lets him. There's a LOT going on, yet Spot can traverse all 1567 colors in mere seconds.
[add] It just occurred to me, maybe I should set a minimum update rate. I don't want it to cause someone to have an epileptic seizure. I'm thinking of setting 10 updates a second as the fastest it would go. What do you guys think?Actually it made me have to kill the JVM to stop the applet (closing the web page didn't work, apparently the new Java plugin sandboxing doesn't work). Only the JList was updating at full speed, not the color wheel.
This one I did not do. There was a complication with intensity. It uses a quantized color space, with intensity almost ranging from 0..74. I say almost because this integral range also includes 0.5. I forced that in so the value after black on a 0.255 scale would not be 4, but 2. The third value is 4, and the rest of the time it jumps by 3 or 4 on the 255 scale.
Once I decided to keep the intensity buttons as they were, it did not make sense to change the tile width buttons either. Their range is only 10..15, so IMO the [-] and [+] buttons work well.Just as a demo how to do that with JSpinner (JSlider is much harder to have non linear scales):
import java.awt.EventQueue;
import java.awt.FlowLayout;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JSpinner;
import javax.swing.SpinnerNumberModel;
public class TestJSpinner {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                SpinnerNumberModel rings = new SpinnerNumberModel(10, 10, 15, 1);
                SpinnerNumberModel intensity = new SpinnerNumberModel(10.0, 0.0, 74.0, 1.0) {
                    @Override
                    public Object getPreviousValue() {
                        Double value = (Double) getValue();
                        if (value == 1.0) {
                            return 0.5;
                        else if (value == 0.5) {
                            return 0.0;
                        else {
                            return super.getPreviousValue();
                    @Override
                    public Object getNextValue() {
                        Double value = (Double) getValue();
                        if (value == 0.0) {
                            return 0.5;
                        else if (value == 0.5) {
                            return 1.0;
                        else {
                            return super.getNextValue();
                JFrame frame = new JFrame("Test");
                frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE);
                frame.getContentPane().setLayout(new FlowLayout());
                frame.getContentPane().add(new JSpinner(intensity));
                frame.getContentPane().add(new JSpinner(rings));
                frame.pack();
                frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
                frame.setVisible(true);
}Edited by: Walter Laan on Nov 5, 2010 2:01 PM