Re: What people are really doing on the Web

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

Hi Matthew,

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> Some ideas for how Epiphany could make these things easier:
> *   Better integration of Web pages, bookmarks, and feeds.
> *   Spell-check.
> *   Let people save a half-written Weblog post (an entire Web page with
>     a half-filled-out form) as a draft that they can return to later.
> *   Include Preview buttons for partially-downloaded music files in the
>     download manager.
> *   Include a financial search engine (such as Google Finance) in the
>     default set of search engines.
> *   Let people easily associate Weblogs with address book entries and
>     buddy list entries.

Thank you for your input.

Of the beforementioned ideas, the spell check functionality is closest 
to being implemented. The UI isn't finished yet [1] and probably won't 
be ready for 2.16. However it is quite possible that there will be 
GConf key(s) to enable spell checking for various languages; an 
extension could put a (preliminary) GUI on that. (Anyone who's willing 
to help code this, consider yourself invited to!)

"Better integration of Web pages, bookmarks, and feeds" sounds cool, but 
what would it mean in practice? Should the RSS extension be polished up 
and integrated into the core? (I'm not against this, as weblogs/RSS 
feeds become an ever more integral part of the web browsing experience.)

Your idea about saving partly-completed forms is related to bug 118452 
[2] except that the recovery function should have an UI instead of just 
kicking in, in case of starting up after a crash. I have a gut feeling 
that it should be possible to connect the contents of a web form to a 
(temporary) sticky note or something similar, that's retained in cases 
where the form isn't submitted.

For as long as we don't have seamless Nautilus integration for 
downloads, the preview function might be a good idea. Dieguito was 
recently hacking on the download manager interface, maybe he knows if 
this is possible/easy to do?

About the financial search engine: how well does this localize? The 
'Search the web' smart bookmark can be included because Google is 
available in most languages and regions, but I wouldn't know about 
financial search engines. Google finance is just US English at this 
moment, as far as I can see.

With regard to "address book entries and buddy list entries", we'd have 
to know first what is the authorative source of address and buddy data. 
E-D-S? Gaim? Contacts maybe?

As always, keep filing bugs where you see them :-)



[1] For the other readers, on the list, Matthew has already given some 
UI ideas on http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/FeatureDesign/Spellchecking

[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118452


regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen	   ***	student of Artifical Intelligence
email: reinout cs vu nl    ***	mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
www.vanschouwen.info       ***	help mee met GNOME vertalen: nl.gnome.org