Re: 2 UI comments on the Alpha Sneak Preview

On 9/23/03 2:22 PM, Ned Baldessin wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've just played with the Alpha Sneak Preview, it's very impressive.

thanks

> 
> I have two comments regarding the user interface that may be worthwhile
> looking into. These comments have been made after using BXE on the
> "inline BXE demo".

we appreciate every input/feedback.

> 
> 1. Toolbar
> The user is viewing and editing the page at the same time, so why put
> the editor toolbar over the top of the page ? Why not create a new 'row'
> in the browser, under the location bar ? I'm thinking of a XUL overlay
> here. The idea is to have a row of "standard" widgets, visualy
> integrated with the browser.
> Pros :
>     - Very clear distinction between the document and the tool (buttons,
> menus, etc).
>     - Better consistency with the browser : the widgets follow the
> look-and-feel of the current theme.
> Cons :
>     - Not cross-browser (XUL). I understand that at this point you have
> more or less abandonned support for IE, that is a dying browser anyway,
> so I'm not sure if this is really important or not.

I played with XUL and wanted to use it (neglecting the crossbrowser 
stuff). There were to main issues with it

- XUL within XHTML doesn't work properly. Or better said, _I_ couldn't 
make it work properly ;) One of the main ideas of BXE was and still is 
to provide easy integration in existing projects/CMS/you-name-it. And 
therefore it has to work with simple HTML documents. It's too much pain 
to have the implementators force to deliver XUL, IMHO.

- remote xul is also one of those not much used features out there. You 
get a lot of tutorials/help etc, if you serve XUL from your chrome 
directory, but leaving that, you're mostly on you own (maybe that 
improved). Furthermore you have a lot of security restrictions if you 
serve XUL remotely. This is another goal of BXE: It should work 
remotely, meaning you don't have to install anything to get it work 
(this will change a little in the future, if you want some of the more 
advanced stuff, which you only can make work, if it's installed locally, 
like really-native-clipboard access, saving to local files, etc..)

Having said that, i'd like to point out, that there are implementations 
for mozile, which use XUL, and AFAIK the xpi version of mozile does have 
a seperate tool bar as well. And BXE uses it's own widget system 
(implement in js/widgets.js). It's maybe not perfect (since I didn't 
check for dependencies), but it should be possible to take the API of 
that and rewrite it using XUL or any other system you want.


> 2. Modal Dialogs
> The dialogs used to create tables, links, or insert images are pretty
> poor (are they JS confirm()ations ?). 

They are f***ing ugly ;) And it's even worse on OSX as they stupidly 
slide-in in a too slow speed...

I completely agree with you. I just didn't write a widget until now to 
get them nicer and easy configurable. I first just needed the 
functionality.

I filled a bug about it ->

http://bugs.bitfluxeditor.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311

> Ideally, there should be a way to
> create widgets that call custom dialog windows with multiple user input
> fields. For example, if you click on the "create table" button, you
> should have a single dialog window that contains input fields such as :
> rows, columns, title, summary. Or the dialog for an image insertion
> should let you upload the image to the server, etc.
> Maybe the UI of these dialog windows could be automatically created,
> based on the requested data fields and types (like the admin in BX-CMS).
> But it would also be desirable to be able to override this, and create
> (in XHTML ? in XUL ? in Flash ?) a custom user interface.

If you change the widget, this should be possible.

 > Example of "rich" dialogs, in IE/Win only :
 > http://www.fredck.com/FCKeditor/Demo/

no IE/Win here at the moment ;)

chregu

> 
> 
> Cheers.

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