Re: comments on annoteam UI

Thank you for your comments, Danny.

At 03:03 PM 8/26/2002 -0400, Daniel Weitzner wrote:
>I've just been using annotatea features in Amaya 6.2 and find the service
>quite useful. A few UI-related comments that might make use a bit more
>smooth:
>
>-file save vs. annotation post: The naive user (me) may not think much about
>the difference between a local save and a post to a remote server. The
>temptation is to use the file/save ICON in the annotation window to save.

point well-taken.  The "natural" set of gestures leaves you with
a local annotation.  And it takes more than one additional
gesture to post an annotation to a server.  That imbalance
is worth correcting.

>I'd suggest either adding a post icon next to that or removing the save icon
>from the toolbar.

I vote for an additional icon, next to the save icon.

>-mouseover: reading annotations would be much easier if it were possible to
>mouseover the pencil icon.

indeed.  We've been looking forward to mouseover support
in Amaya for a long time.  When it arrives, you can be sure
we're planning to use it within annotations.

>-annotation server list is confusing: What happens when you have more than
>one server in the 'annotation server list'. Does the post go to the first
>one, all of them, localhost and and first? It would be nice if the UI could
>illuminate this part of the mechanism a bit more.

I guess the documentation does not make the current
Annotations/configure dialog box sufficiently clear.  We
recognize that that dialog needs several significant
changes -- to easily deselect and reselect individual
query servers for example.  Marja and I have sketches
of what we think would be a much improved configure
dialog, and we had been waiting for the GTK support
to give better UI tools before proceeding.  Now that
the GTK support is more stable, we should be able
to make progress on this.

But your question points out a more fundamental
confusion; the "Annotation servers" list on the right
of the dialog are the servers to which queries are
sent when Amaya is searching for annotations.
The server to which a new annotation is POSTed
is determined from the single entry on the left  in
"Annotation post server".  Perhaps the word
"POST" should be capitalized or all-caps there
as a quick improvement.

The Post server is not queried unless it also appears
in the "Annotation servers" list.


>Thanks for your work on this.

Thanks for your comments.

-Ralph


>Danny

Received on Friday, 30 August 2002 14:17:34 UTC