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Re: [Straw-devel] alternative views


From: Juri Pakaste
Subject: Re: [Straw-devel] alternative views
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 19:36:44 +0200

(This is partly a rehash of the discussion on IRC, with a little more
thought and just for the permanent record.)

On Sat, 2003-11-15 at 17:34, Jan Alonzo wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 05:16, Juri Pakaste wrote:
> > enumerate the options below.
> > 
> > 1) Subscriptions list + article view
> > 
> > The user selects which feed to read from the list, the article view
> > contains all the items in the feed, one after the other.
> 
> Not all. There should be an option in the properties on how many items
> to display for this feed for this view. Either that or just display the
> new items.

Only new items probably won't work. The whole new items (or unread
items, really) concept will have some serious trouble adapting to a view
where the user doesn't explicitly select articles. There's no way to
know if the user has read a particular article when they are using the
combined view, so what we probably have to do is mark all articles in
feed X as read as soon as the user enters feed X. (Note that this only
applies to the combined view - a view with the article list would
function as it does now.)

> > 
> > 2) Article list + article view
> > 
> > The article list contains all the articles in all the feeds (there
> > should be one extra column saying which feed it is), article view
> > contains the selected one.
> > 
> > 3) Article view
> > 
> > The article view contains all the articles in all the feeds.
> 
> Does anyone feel strongly about having this?

I don't know about people on the list - I suppose y'all more or less
like the three pane view, or you wouldn't be here - but I've heard other
people express the opionion that they prefer an all-in-one view. And I
admit it works pretty well on, for example, Planet GNOME.

> > And of course, options two and three might still have the subscriptions
> > list visible, but it wouldn't be used for selecting feeds to read. And
> > maybe those "all the items" item views should be paginated if the number
> > of articles to show is > N. 
> 
> See my response above for (1).
> 
> > A page list in the place of the item list? A
> > dropdown list of pages? Links?
> > 
> > Would you find it useful to have one or many of these available, as
> > alternatives to the current view? How do you think it should work?
> 
> Yes, I find (1) useful. (1) is basically what you've already said plus
> if the user selects an item in the item list, it should act as before,
> displays data for that item. Select the feed, display N items for that
> feed where N is based on what the user sets in the feed properties
> dialog. Select item, display that item.

I disagree with this. I think this would be surprising and confusing.

Now, maybe it would work if a selection made in the article list instead
moved the article list so it would scroll to the item in question. You
know, like if the user had clicked an anchor link - still display the
whole thing, but focus on the one article. But I don't know the widget
supports this, and I'm not quite sure if even this is a good idea.

> May I also suggest that we move the item view on the right, in its own
> column so we can have:
> 
>  _______ __________ ________
> |       |          |        |
> | List  | Articles |  Item  |
> |       |          |  View  |
> |       |          |        |
> |_______|__________|________|
> 
> 
> Why? Because when you have a feed that updates frequently, article list
> becomes populated a lot with new items and I want to browse it. I always
> end up dragging the item view pane down further and dragging it back up
> again to read the article.
> 
> With the proposed view, I can easily browse the articles at the same
> time shift my attention to the item view if I want to read that article.

Yeah, as I said on IRC, might be a nice idea if only it didn't eat so
much horizontal real estate. However, basically there's no good way to
fit that kind of window into 1024 pixels, at least I don't think there
is, and even 1024 is a bit on the wide side. I suppose we might drop the
keep column and instead make it a flag that would display the same way
as the images are shown in the subscriptions list, but I don't think
that's enough. 

I might include this as an option, if it was implemented cleanly enough.
I'm not sure how big an impact it would have on the code, though...
you'd need a tabbed pane (with invisible tabs), plus some code that
moved widgets from one tab to another, as you can't have the same widget
in more than one place, I believe.

-- 
[ Juri Pakaste / address@hidden / http://www.iki.fi/juri/ ]





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