Re: Use del.icio.us to automatically suggest topics for bookmarks

[Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>]

On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 15:19 +0100, Pete O'Grady wrote:
> I'll leave it at that really until someone thinks of something fun to do
> with it ;) http://www.dsl.uow.edu.au/~harvey/mockup.png

I've uploaded a new mockup:
  http://www.dsl.uow.edu.au/~harvey/mockup2.png

For those who've just joined in, this is a proposed enhancement
(majority of ideas from Reinout, who has been *very* patient) to the
topic selector for bookmarks. On the left you have your current set of
topics, with checkboxes for that that you want associated with the
current bookmark. On the right you have a palette of quickly accessible
topics.

The top-half is determined in exactly the same way as the bookmark menus
are built. That is, it shows the top-level submenus on the bookmark menu
first. After you select a topic, it shows the submenus *within that
topic*. This makes topic selection a little more like travelling into a
tree (though you still may have more than one tree to pick from to reach
the same destination, don't worry). With this mode of operation the user
doesn't have to scroll up and down a massive list of topics/keywords all
the time. They will, however, find that the list changes as they select
a keyword. But since we all got used to navigating folders in Windows, I
expect we can handle it. :)

The bottom-half is loaded from the net (deli.cio.us). We have a few
options here. A small text message indicates that the list is being
loaded, and is hidden once the list is complete. We have the option of
hard-coding this (ie. writing as C) or leaving it as python-extensible.
Personally I prefer the C approach as I have no other use for python on
my system. A mix of the two could always be done anyway (ie. default C
implementation for deli.cio.us, python-extensible if you want to change
it or want to fetch from other sources).

Selecting a topic from the palette is a matter of:
 - clicking the arrow button; or
 - double-clicking the topic; or
 - dragging the topic across.
We plan for all of them to work. In any case, the left list will scroll
(smoothly if possible) to the topic that you just checked. If you select
a topic that does *not* exist in your current collection (ie. a
del.icio.us topic that you don't already have) it will be created
automatically.

Finally, some possible options:
 - Hiding the scrollbar for the palette when possible. Makes it more 
   palette-ey.
 - Adding a small heading beneath the horizontal line indicating the
   source/extension from which these suggestions came.
 - Using libots to generate a list of topics from the text.
 - Filtering the fetched suggestions by topics the user already has to
   avoid duplication on-screen.

I do expect the quick-picks (name change?) to be at least as thin as the
topics list, again to indicate that it's a palette and not the
'document'. I also expect that horizontal line to be better placed. :)

Regards,
Peter.