Le 30 mars 07 à 09:02, Jesse Ross a écrit :
So... lots of interface ideas flying back and forth around the list
and SILC channel lately. ;)
I started doing some mockups of some of these ideas, which you can
check out here:
http://jesseross.com/clients/etoile/ui/concepts/01/workspace_100.jpg
http://jesseross.com/clients/etoile/ui/concepts/01/workspace_200.jpg
http://jesseross.com/clients/etoile/ui/concepts/01/workspace_300.jpg
http://jesseross.com/clients/etoile/ui/concepts/01/workspace_400.jpg
Looks really nice.
A lot of this stuff hasn't been agreed upon by everyone, but it
helps to incite discussion by seeing it in a somewhat realistic
form. Here's what the above are:
100 is a view of a desktop with a single project on it. This
project has been minimized.
I like the idea (except perhaps the fact the project is put on the
desktop). The possibility to put such project files/objects in the
Shelf would allow simple project switching. The question would be
then whether it's necessary to have a special tab to play this role
and only this one.
200 is a view of that same project zoomed in. I haven't determined
how to indicate where you currently are in the hierarchy of
projects, if that's even necessary.
I'm not sure we should support hierarchy of projects, I mean the user
won't get lost into this hierarchy by just creating a bunch of them,
yet I like the idea very much.
To fight my own argument I could say it was used against hierarchical
folder feature more than twenty years ago. So my objection against
hierarchy of projects is surely specious ;-)
I also haven't decided how to zoom back out of the project (perhaps
double-clicking on the desktop...?).
Would probably work well.
Some additional things you can see from this mockup:
- Person icons, with status indicators (differentiated by both
color and shape)
- No titlebars. The idea behind this is that we would use a
modifier key to indicate small vs large movements on active
documents. Small movements are things done _within_ active
documents and large movements are things done _to_ active documents
as a whole. So, for example, to open a non-active (minimized)
document, one could just double click on it (no modifier key
necessary as this is on a non-active document). Once it is opened,
in order to move it around, one holds down the modifier key and
drags it around (large movement). To minimize the window, one holds
down the modifier key and double clicks (large movement). I've just
started getting some of this into Flash -- all you can do is use
Alt to switch between the modes and move the windows while in
"Large" mode: http://jesseross.com/clients/etoile/ui/concepts/01/
etoile.html . I still need to add in the minimizing code.
I'm really much in favor of unifying interaction between small vs
large movements. But I don't believe removing titlebars is a good
idea or an idea that would work well for every users. I think there
are two different points.
- some users never use modifiers keys and menu shortcuts, they just
do everything the mouse and just use the keyboard for text input.
Such users will never be able to use modifier keys + mouse at the
same time, it's just too difficult. A possibility to workaround this
point would be to use the right mouse button for large movements by
default, that may work though it could still be difficult for some
people to grasp.
- titlebars provide a visual anchor which ease to find window areas
quickly on screen when many windows are visible or when windows are
stacked vertically or lined horizontally. As Yen-Ju outlined it, it
makes also easier to know which window is key. If you paste window
screenshots inside a document, you can have a confusing experience
when you try to know where are the real windows on screen, I suppose
this experience will happen quite often if you get rid of titlebars
Finally as Yen-Ju detailed it, you probably get to many modifier keys
or modifier key combos to remember.
Aside of these remarks, I really like the whole idea and nothing
prevent us to support all these features even if we keep titlebars.
- Not all files have file names. Creating a new file does just
that -- it makes a blank document in some predefined, user-
customizable size. As such, you don't need to necessarily name the
document. This is handy for things like photos that are more
readily identifiable based on looking at a thumbnail. Some
documents, like code, may require a file name in order to compile.
This would be set in the Settings... menu option, as seen in the
next image.
ok.
300 is a sample menu window opened -- this is all subject to change.
400 is a different interpretation of the Shelf. This is something
that Nicolas and David and I discussed yesterday. It's kind of a
cross between the OS X Dashboard and the pasteboard, and how we had
intended to use the shelf-within-the-panel. The Shelf is a place to
store things temporarily. When you Pick something, this is where
you can Drop it. The advantage over the panelized-shelf is that
it's not crowding the screen, and it's 2 dimensional and spatial.
I really like the proposal but I would need details about how you
interact with, otherwise I cannot really tell you my opinion about
it :-)
For Fosdem, I write down a quite different proposal from the tabbed
Shelf one I posted few I posted few days ago. We didn't get enough
time to discuss it, so here is a very short and partial summary here:
The main difference with my lastest proposal is it supports two
display modes:
- row mode (more or less like a tab but snapped to the border of a
window or any screen border, you can have several rows distributed
accross the screen)
- worktable mode (mostly what you describe with 400 and only for one
row at a time)
I temporarily get away of worktable mode in my latest proposal
because I haven't found a way to integrate it properly without
resorting to modifier keys (especially for drag/drop). It seems
critical you could access it and interact with it only with mouse.
I will post another mail with a lot more details about this proposal
later.
One other thing to notice about these is that there is no Panel
representation.
By Panel, I suppose you mean Shelf?
Cheers,
Quentin.
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