Re: [Epiphany] Bookmarks system

[Lee Willis <lwillis plus net>]

Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpeseng@tin.it> writes:

> > ...if it's a dialog that obscures your browsing or is otherwise
> > invasive (Because it has to be activated each time you want to use
> > it) then it becomes less efficient than a menu IMHO ...
> 
> Heh hard to make a call basing ourself just on our IHMO ;)
> The dialog seem to even take less time here while providing a better and
> more powerfull view of the collection, but I need to stop saying this
> ... not very productive ;)

Let's junk the "efficiency/speed" discussions - after all they're just
implementation constraints - I'm sure you'll work your nuts off to make
them go away if we need to :)

I'll try to avoid points made on speed from now on ...

> > What I'd like to see is the current bookmarks dialog be an always on
> > docked sidebar (Think of the Favourites sidebar in IE). That gives us
> > the following advantages:
> > 
> > - Always available - doesn't need to be opened each time you need it

This point still stands since it's not directly based on performance
issues, but on whether I can start using bookmarks without an extra
step. Currently I have to open the bookmark dialog before I can start
doing anything - that's an extra step that I'd like to see go away. In
it's place I'd like to see either a docked view, or the ability to say
that I want a toolbar present that shows me all bookmarks matching a
given keyword, or keywords. This also satisfies my requirement below.

> > - Doesn't obscure the browsing view (My problem is I check several news
> 
> I thought to that too a pair of time but I dont think it would improve
> the thing much for me. I dont like to browse with clutter around my web
> page so I'd keep closing the sidebar.

It's only "clutter" if it gets in the way of what you're trying to
do. For me the current dialog is clutter since it obscures pages that
I'm trying to interact with - toolbars or docked views don't have that
problem - the page flows around them (Of course both can have their own
problems if you're on a small screen - I'd like to solve this in a
similar way to how galeon used to do it - ie the bookmark interface
[However we define it] should be either a docked view, or a dialog (As
we currently have it now), This way the user can put in place the right
solution for their environment constraints. The default I think should
be docked though since my *guess* is that enough people can afford the
screen real-estate ...

> It wouldnt make it worst though .... The conflict is in the close
> behavior. Sidebar or not I'd prefer the thing to close automatically
> when I selected a bookmark.

For a dialog that makes sense - it makes no sense for a docked pane ...

> Looking at the design as a whole there are two ways to do what you was
> describing (open all your favourite news sites): bookmarks toolbars
> (with the keyword dnd still not implemented)

Yes that sort of solves my problem, although not really efficiently
 since I can't middle clik a toolbar item to open in new window/tab.

>  and autocompletion (ctrl+l lin get me to linuxtoday very fastly).

Ooh - putting keywords in the URL bar solves completely my point
later[1] - although it should be case-insensitive - do you want a bug on
that?

> If we move bookmarks in a sidebar we will have some more problems for
> editing 

Why?

> (unless the plan was to have both dialog as editor and sidebar as
> navigator ?), maybe they can be solved, dunno.

No - see above. I'd like the bookmark interface to do two things:-
"Managing bookmarks" and "Choosing bookmark to open". This is
irrespective of how it is managed on a window level (ie docked, or as a
dialog in it's own window)

> > If you have the docked approach above then you don't have any context
> > confusion since the link will always open in the window that you click
> > the link in (Or the active tab of that window). I think that's kind of
> > obvious for the end-user?
> 
> Sounds obvious to me, yeah.

However - if we allow the bookmark UI to be in it's own window [As I
suggested above] then you still have major problems about how the user
selects their "active" window.

The GIMP also has these same issues in the same way, ie you have several
document windows, and a window that can change things (The toolbox in
GIMP - bookmark UI in epiphany) - but no clear way to tie the changing
to a specific window. They built a whole "active window" management
system to get around this (IIRC something like a single click of Ctrl in
the window you want to be active and a small indicator area in each
window which showed whether it was the "active" window). I don't think
we want to do that [Unless their code is easily re-usable], and I don't
particularly think we can build the "right thing" without it. If you
decide to implement the ability for the bookmark UI to be in it's own
window I think you just have to come up with a basic rule and live with
it not being perfect :(

> Prolly META would make the keywords list useless. I dont read pages
> source very often but I have the impression designers put tons of words
> there to be more visible on search engines. Am I wrong ?

Depends how much porn you browse I s'pose ;)  I think most serious sites
use sensible keywords that are actually relevant - perhaps an
implementation would help us guage how useful this actually is though
... If it never crops up on its own I may try myself to see how far I get!

Lee
-- 
| Lee Willis                                  Unmetered & ADSL solutions 
| Solutions Designer                                 for Home & Business 
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