[annotator-dev] UX/UI improvements

[Marc-Antoine Lemieux]

For the selection, I was thinking something like the Hightligther than
would hold the selection until the Editor is disposed (either because an
annotation was created or the action was cancelled.). I tried quickly to
use directly the Highlighter plugin and it seemed to "work" but I would
need only the display part of it and remove all event handler bound to it.
If I have more time I'll probably work on this a bit. I agree with you that
trying to hold the browser selection might be impossible if we only use the
browser selection.

For the adder behavior, I'll try to open a PR tomorrow or next week to
discuss that. I have a couple of idea but they don't really work if
multiples bubble or items can be shown at the same time. I wanted to have
the Adder, Editor and Viewer always on top and centered but it caused
problems since can all appear at the same time on the version I am using.
And yes, there's some polishing to do here to make sure it displays
properly depending on the window. I had also problems where the body had a
fixed width that was smaller than the window (like any support.apple.com
pages) which caused a wrong placement.

As for the last point, I agree that plugins should not know each other, but
I feel there's something missing to coordinate the global behavior of the
library. I wondered why I didn't see his PR... it's 4 hours old :). I'll
definitely check it out.

I'm still wondering if using master was the right choice at the beginning,
but since I knew we would mosty certainly want to customize the behavior
(which we did), the new version seemed to be better than v1 (better code
organization and so on).



Marc-Antoine Lemieux

2014-09-25 16:26 GMT-04:00 Randall Leeds <tilgovi at hypothes.is>:

> 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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