Re: [Tb] Fundamental usability issues & bugs

At 3:12 PM -0500 12/19/05, Lee Phillips wrote:
>Anyway, I use the dialog to choose a template,
>and hit the update button, but as the poster says, nothing happens.

I think that Mark Bernstein's email was overly simple (busy, Mark?
*grin*), but I don't think it was wrong or on the wrong subject. The
symptoms that Lee describes, while frustrating, don't seem buggy-- if
the *file* has no Text Export Template set, then when you get into
the Text Export / Nakakoji View, the notes don't have a template set.

Another way to explain this: Tinderbox notes inherit their
attributes, including their export template choices, in this order:

Tinderbox Preferences (in the Edit Menu)
Document Preferences (in the Edit Menu)
Prototype note
Note

If any one of those doesn't have a value, it looks to the line above
it. While that makes sense for attributes you make or assign,
there's a piece missing in this discussion: those top two items, the
Preferences, will have a value that is more like this:

/MyHardDrive/Users/Documents/My_Tinderbox_Stuff/My_Thesis/textexport.txt

while the bottom two items, the notes, will have values that look like this:

anothertextexport.txt

Basically, Tinderbox uses the file's default text and HTML exports as
the 'root' file when it notes the other templates to use. Which
means that if you don't have a default export template set, then it
doesn't matter that in the dialog to choose a template, you
effectively tell Tinderbox "use the file called myexporttemplate.txt
in the same folder as my default template." Because there is no
'same folder'. That is frustratingly hard to find in the
documentation (it is mentioned somewhere for HTML export but not,
IIRC, for text export), but it explains the behavior described.

That said, the UI is a bit awkward for that window. It would be nice
for the window to default to "selected notes only" rather than "all
notes" to avoid the slowness that Lee describes. It would also be
nice to have a more explicit warning that the problem isn't merely
that the *note* doesn't have a template chosen, but that the *file*
doesn't have a template chosen. The warnings to those effects ("No
export template chosen") don't indicate how to properly fix the
problem-- it is understandable to try to fix the problem by choosing
an export template *in that window* rather than in the preferences,
but that doesn't work.

> > Of course, if the template button in Text Export changed the default
>> template, then it would be hard to change the template for a specific
>> note
>
>seems to have nothing to do with the specific issues described. If it isn't
>clear what problems he's describing, why don't you try following him along in
>the program, putting yourself in the user's shoes, and see what he sees on the
>screen? That's what I did, instead of assuming that he was confused, and the
>problems were obvious.

What Mark said made sense to me, even in a user's shoes, so when I
got this note, I took another look at the thread. The initial email
presented some large issues ("real design flaws") with some clear
frustration. I think Mark addressed the design issue rather than the
present problem of how-to-do-what-Andy-wanted. Missing the real
issue, but not as offensive to my eyes as Lee's response implies.

Andy, does what I just walked through work or make sense?

> > Choosing one item from a list of a hundred or so is a UI problem, not
>> only for Tinderbox but (to the best of my knowledge) for everyone.
>
>The poster didn't say what he thought was wrong with the Attributes window (if
>that was where he thought the problem was). Is that what we're talking about?

There are three and a half places to talk about the "UI for
Attributes", and it would be easier to help if we know which one
we're talking about (or all three). There's the Attributes
palette/window, the drop-down menu for Key Attributes on the margin
of each note's window, the display of the Key Attributes at the top
of each note's window, and the drop-down menu in the Create
Note/Rename dialog box. Andy didn't say which of those he found
clunky, though I know that I have struggled with the Attributes
palette/window a few times, trying to figure out whether I'm supposed
to 'create' then enter or de-select all the attributes and then enter
a value and hit create, whether there is a way to change the name of
a User Attribute once it is created (I haven't found one yet).

Andy, is that what you were struggling with, or was it the whole
kit-and-kaboodle, or something else?

Lee brings up some neat UI points, but I think they were
ships-in-the-night with Mark's comments. Mark seemed to be
addressing the problem of working with drop-down menus for choosing
Key Attributes while Lee raises good ideas about the Attributes
palette/window.

>For example, in the unix shell (any of them) you constantly have the
>problem of
>"Choosing one item from a list of a hundred or so" and you can
>usually do so in
>a few keystrokes. The items in this case are filenames or the names of
>available commands. In the mutt email program I can choose from
>among a list of
>a hundred contacts to which to send a letter in about three keystrokes.
>Incorporating this kind of (extremely efficient) keyboard-oriented interface
>into a GUI program would be a departure from convention, I guess, but has it
>been looked into?

I'm curious what the shell/mutt solution you're thinking of is... is
it tab-completion? OS X gives Tinderbox that sort of functionality
in the drop-down menus... pull up the menu, type a few letters and
the nearest item to what you typed is highlighted. You can then use
the arrow keys to move up and down the list. It's still frustrating
if you don't know which attribute you're looking for, though, and I
have a hard time with that. Are user attributes at the top of the
list (KAtts in the margin), at the bottom of the list (KAtts in the
CreateNote) or in their own menu (Atts in the Attributes
palette/window)?

--Scott
Received on Tue Dec 20 16:55:30 2005