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.
--
christian stocker | Bitflux GmbH | schoeneggstrasse 5 | ch-8004 zurich
phone +41 1 240 56 70 | mobile +41 76 561 88 60 | fax +41 1 240 56 71
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