[annotator-dev] UX/UI improvements

Thu Sep 25 20:26:03 UTC 2014

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 1:14 PM, Marc-Antoine Lemieux <
marc at marcantoinelemieux.com> wrote:

> Here's the behavior I am talking about for the overlapping bubbles (
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11784435/Selection_021.png). To be
> clear, there's always only one Editor bubble shown. It's the interactions
> with the Viewer and the Adder that are problematic. I also made sure it was
> instantiated only once.
>

Ah, okay.

I thought it wasn't possible for these things to be shown at the same time.
It may be a regression of sorts on master, even.

>
> As for the disappearing selection, I don't know what I can show you...
> it's only that the selection is "lost" when entering the comment and we had
> user that came back to us saying it was confusing and they'd prefer to have
> the selection there while they enter a comment.
>

I understand. I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done for this
one, as I don't know how well we can prevent the selection from being lost
while typing and focusing the editor, although we could restore it
afterward probably.

>
> About the jumpy experience, we also had feedback from our users saying
> that when they hover an annotation and they mouseout and mouseenter
> against, the Viewer is just jumping from one place to another instead of
> staying in place. We had a similar comment about the Adder that appears
> where the cursor is instead of on a relative position to the annotation. We
> currently have a fix that is not working <= IE9 but it provides us an
> experience similar as the one on https://medium.com/. (gist of our
> solution: https://gist.github.com/lemieux/9470dcf998bfe90d4a45)
> Basically, it display the Adder icon always on top center of the annotation.
>

Yeah! I saw your gist and I'm fond of the idea. Let's open a PR and discuss
how we can test it and also ensure it's always visible (I think it may need
some bounds clamping to ensure its on screen)

> About the display manager, it was only an idea on how to manage that
> stuff. Currently, it seems to me that plugins are "fighting" against each
> other for mouse events, display, etc. and I'm not too certain on how one
> plugin should tell another to hide or to move.
>

Since you're keeping up with master, you _definitely_ want to check out
Nick's latest PR. We're attempting to finally clean this up nicely.
https://github.com/openannotation/annotator/pull/444

The idea is that plugins should not know about one another. Instead, either
a composite plugin that includes both or simply the application should
handle the coordination. So we could add a very lightweight amount of
"display management" code to the Default UI that simply ensures that only
one bubble is visible at a time, for instance.

I'm sure Nick would be glad for more feedback, though. I know I would be.
This refactoring started months ago but I never had time to finish it up.
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