Re: [xwiki-devs] [UX][Proposal] Annotation UI Improvements

Hi Caty, On 01/15/2010 09:37 PM, Ecaterina Valica wrote: The proposal is very cool, and after a talk with Marta, here's a summary of the thoughts we had: * IMO there should be a way to completely hide the annotations: the note icons & the annotations bar. In this spirit, I think when an annotation is displayed it should always display the highlighted text and the icon to make the display accessible and the actions. When an annotation is hidden, it is completely hidden (highlighted text & icon). Otherwise put, highlight & icon should go together. * also, completely hide should include the blue bar or filtering panel or anything is there * there should be a link from the top of the document to the annotations tab, as for the other tabs (comments, attachments, etc), or any other way of accessing it from the annotations context * in the spirit of the bullets above, we could display an "Annotations" shortcut next to the Comments & Attachments & all, with a 'more options' button, something like: http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Improvements/AnnotationsPro… and, on clicking it, it can either: - slide in a panel with annotation options above the document (where the current bar is). Sliding as in the Administration category slide (when you click "show available categories"). pros: leaves options available when document is read cons: moves the content potentially out of view when it is slided in - display a popup panel on top the document (as in 'over', like a dialog), where one chooses filtering options and then closes it. pros: leaves everything in it's place when it's displayed cons: potentially hides document content, it has to be closed before one reads the document, it won't be available when document is read. However not having the panel available all the time would pose problems for the visibility of the two options to the right of the bar (add button, which should be there all the time, and display / hide all). The following are 2 ideas (need polishing): http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Improvements/AnnotationsPro… (where the panel would keep it's position to the right margin of the document on scrolling) or http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Improvements/AnnotationsPro… (where one would need to scroll itself to access the buttons). * adding an annotation could be done by pushing the "add button" then going in the content & selecting text and when the mouse is up, the create window appears. In other words, pushing the add button would have the same behaviour as holding the CTRL key down. Speaking of which, it seems that CTRL + select is reserved in firefox for selecting a table or smth, and I also think it's reserved to selecting full words in IEs. Could you investigate on that and try to figure out what other modifier could do the job? (if a modifier is required) Also, but less important: * authors of annotations is just one metadata of an annotation as any other metadata (keep in mind that annotations are planned to be expandable with any other metadata), meaning that, there shouldn't be given special importance to filtering for a specific user or coloring, or etc. However it's not very important, the mocks serve well as filtering examples if we abstract the criteria. * in the annotations tab, the order of the info should be: selected text and annotation metadata (comment) rather than the other way around, because usually the metadata refers the text and it's more natural for the user to know the annotated text when it reads the metadata. However that whole tab should be customizable for extra metadata so that's not that important * dangling annotations also have content (it's the original content on which they were added) and it's part of their meaning (I also added an extra explanation on the page about why we want to keep them). WDYT? (hoping that you had the patience to read up to here) Thanks, Anca (and Marta, through my voice)