User impressions and suggestions about Conglomerate (long)

Hi all,
I finally managed to write down some notes about the current version of 
Conglomerate. I have been playing with it since the beginning, and I'm 
really glad that DM picked it up to continue development at such a 
steady pace. Hope my critics can be of help, apologies in advance if 
there's something I just didn't get right. Thanks Dave for all the hard 
work you poured into Conglomerate.


MIXED PROBLEMS

- trying to add a span element to another doesn't always work, and 
sometimes has Conglomerate crashing (quite often, unfortunately);

CURRENT UI PROBLEMS

- windows don't remember size and position;

- the triangle is a nice indicator, but eliminating the double click = 
shade on the element bar is a needless regression: please restore it!

- correspondance between the Overview/Raw XML frames and the main window 
is very useful, but a) it would be nice to have correspondence when 
clicking on text in the main frame too (now you have to click on the 
element bar) b) colour use in unconsistent (black in the main frame, red 
in the Raw XML one); I experienced a general "quirkiness", i.e. 
sometimes it works flawlessly, sometimes you need several mouse clicks 
to have it work;

- text (line) wrap is not there or doesn't work;

- it's not clear to me if the black rectangle around text is equivalent 
to selecting all of the text it envelopes: as trying to apply an item 
from the context menu invariably fails, sometimes crashing conglomerate, 
I'd say it is not;

- the main problem lies in the context menus:

     * they are overcrowded
     * they mix completely different commands (the element property 
window, the classic cut/copy/paste, the element related ones, the input 
method)
     * they are sometimes confusing, e.g. in some cases you get the same 
choices for sub-elements or sibling elements
     * they might be confusing for some users because they change 
according to what you right click on (this is inevitable, however)

- OTOH, if you want to add an attribute to an element you have to choose 
the Property item in the context menu, wait for the window to pop up, 
click on the "DTD" tab then choose the desired attribute.

(FUTURE) UI SUGGESTIONS

To sum up (very quickly!) the different functions, Conglomerate must 
show (directly or within 1 mouse click distance):

- the main view of the document currently edited;
- alternative view of the same:

     View source (plain text with syntax highlighting)
     Raw XML (XML structure with text)
     Overview (overall document structure)

- standard menu/toolbar commands
- element related commands (attributes, siblings, subelement)
- text related commands (add/remove span tags)

There are two ways to quickly add/modify elements to texts: either you 
use context menus to offer a context sensitive choice, as Conglomerate 
has done so far, or you let the user choose from a list, as gedit does 
with the Taglist plugin. The context sensitive approach has the 
advantage to let you see only what's appropriate for the current object, 
the taglist approach allows you to browse among all elements allowed by 
the DTD (which can be useful as a quick reminder).

If Conglomerate will continue using context menus, here are my 
suggestions to improve the current implementation:

1. take cut/copy/paste away from the context menu: they are already 
available from the Edit menu (add shortcuts) and from the toolbar;

2. move "Input method" to the Edit menu;

3. when you right click on any portion of text inside a text rectangle, 
all of the text should considered selected: print it in reverse as 
usual, and a span tag among those available should apply to all of it;

4. viceversa, if you select a single word or group of characters, the 
span tag should be applied only to what you have selected;

5. now to elements, we can get rid of submenus altogether using the 
keyboard:

     * right click: allowed sub-elements list
     * ALT + right click: allowed siblings list
     * CTRL + right click: allowed attributes list

Other thoughts about the UI:

1. the Raw XML view seems kind of pointless to me (IMVHO of course, feel 
free to disagree :) so I would get rid of it and leave more room to the 
Overview (especially when resizing windows, should grow proportionally);

2. the Overview should be open expanded by default, and there should be 
a button on the toolbar to quickly expand/collapse it;

3. it should also be easy to hide completely the sidebar containing the 
Overview (main menu: View -> Sidepane);

4. in future version, the sidepane could host other useful features, 
such as a spell checker, an error log, a tag list view, a unicode 
character selection, etc.

MIXED SUGGESTIONS

- why a non-editable "View source" option? while it certainly is useful, 
it would be nice to have an editable window using gtksourceview; as an 
alternative, an "Edit source" option where you use the GNOME default 
editor to edit raw XML;

- is it possible to have a dispspec file automatically created from a 
DTD? tell me before I start working to a TEI dispspec ;)


Ciao

-- 
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      roberto.rossellidelturco at cisi.unito.it
Dipartimento di Scienze		rosselli at ling.unipi.it
del Linguaggio			Then spoke the thunder	DA
Universita' di Torino		Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)

   Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
   mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)