Hey everyone, so this past week has been really interesting, I sat down and changed my approach to focus first on how I would like amancay to be regarding look +functionality and parting from that develop the code to support such stuff. On the bright side of things, I finished university semester yesterday so I'm now 100% free for soc work :-), previous weeks has been a mess.
First thing I did was to rebase the template over perfect-3-column layout[0], my idea was to take the hand crafted 2-column look[1] of amancay and turn it into a more fail proof one with the addition of flexibility to change which side the column was and etc. However, right now after some testing I'm thinking I should switch to a single column layout with an ocassional contextual right column. I feel the space to the left is being wasted. Later on I gave some love to the bug report page[2] basically stealing ideas from GNOME's bugzilla and Launchpad, I thought that the layout should make it easy for people to focus on the real content and not ugly tables like vanilla bugzilla. So titles are huge, dates are always in "time since" format and I'm planning on adding icons to help recognize bug severities easier, both to single and list view of bugs. One thing that I wanted to try was tag drag and dropping, although in the end it turned out to be a really lame idea for a tagging UI (not really practical, steals too much space) I realized I could use this tagging idea for doing stuff in some other pages, for example dragging a bug from one package to another. In the end this little experiment gave me some ideas and a good grip of MochiKit. Still on the single bug topic, I'm looking forward to implementing some kind of automatic collapse on redundant info, say for example "PGP signed" lines or "System information", maybe even quoted lines. See for example the current look of a cowsay bug[3], it is cluttered top and bottom and makes the real content of the comment hard to grasp unless you focus, I mean it's hard to 'visually eliminate' so much stuff. My goal would be to have this parts made contextual info for comments, for example take 'pgp signed' and make it a lock icon on the header of the comment. Finally, for the bug listing part I thought of trying something different, almost mailreader like[4]. My rationale is that in a bug report list you care about the number, the title and the report/mod date. Author and severity doesn't count that much so I put those in a different row that I'm wondering if I should collapse by default. Like in the single bug report pages I switched dates to time since dates. Also, and just a couple hours of work away now, I wanted to implement starring like in gmail/google stuff, so you can star packages, bugs, people and have their latest activity show in your homepage. What I'm planning for this next week: - finish positioning the forms in single bug reports and convert others like subscribe to 'actions' (say buttons) - implement starring of packages (amancay implements this but not as starring, it's a matter of adapting it) - get a beta running for debconf (Arthur suggested me to get a debian server instead of using mine, I'll ask Margarita and will fall back to my own if it's hard to get one before Wednesday) I'm missing some control@ functionality yet, but I have got a grip of amancay code and feel confident it's not complicated to implement hence I'm trying to focus on making the current functionality have a kick ass UI so this new stuff will blend into an already great workflow. I kindly ask all of you for any comment on the screenshots[5] of the new layout, please let me know what you think either here or in a flickr comment. Btw, you can checkout[6] amancay and run it in your machine, at least to check out the looks since actions are a bit broken now because of the layout change. Thanks! 0 - http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-3-column.htm 1 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/3735674223/ 2 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/3736418936/ 3 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/3736418538/ 4 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/3736419288/ 5 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/tags/soc2009/ 6 - svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/bts-webui/bts_webui Appendix: The lame git shortlog that says really little, all of it in SVN[6] already: 1d25d1e bug list: further visual changes efa8dc5 bug list: enhance layout a bit more 249a867 search: remove useless orderedlist 8a47aca bug list: sort bugs by package dd0e784 icons: add some stock icons 066c395 search: remove a wrong 'not' breaking search a17de3b tags: new tag dragndrop UI alpha 2d652b6 templates: use the new MochiKit version 20917f9 bug_tags: clarify how the tag works d276d31 mochikit: update to v1.4.2 d60c455 bug: enhance bug rendering page de1f500 tables: minor nitpicks 6c8d953 templates: use 2 column layout 2e1d6cc templates: use timesince in bug table 654a35d template_filters: add tstodatetime filter _______________________________________________ Soc-coordination mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination
