[jsword-devel] Flexible layout

[DM Smith]

Hey Joe,
Great to hear from you! Always love your radical ideas!

So how is it going? I see that DWR is about to do a new release. Awesome 
stuff!

If that frees up your time and you want to pick up where we left off, 
I'd love for your contributions!

-- DM

Joe Walker wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 6:52 PM, DM Smith <dmsmith at crosswire.org 
> <mailto:dmsmith at crosswire.org>> wrote:
>
>     There are a bunch of SWORD/JSword applications. Until very
>     recently, The SWORD Project for Windows and Bible Desktop (BD)
>     were the only ones available for Windows. Mac OS had BD and
>     MacSword. On Linux, there was BibleTime, GnomeSword (now renamed
>     Xiphos) and BD. (This is not to minimize AlKitab as it like BD
>     runs on the same platforms.)
>
>     This is changing. Xiphos now runs on Windows. Soon BibleTime will
>     run on Windows and Macs.
>
>     In discussions on the sword-devel mailing list, we have noted that
>     these apps do pretty much the same thing, with some significant
>     feature differences. No one app has run away with the prize. There
>     are a variety of reasons, but I think the most common reason is
>     that a user's favorite app works the way that they want to
>     approach scripture reading and/or study.
>
>     The current layout of BD assumes that the primary use is that of
>     reading the Bible. Our goal for Bible Desktop is to have a simple,
>     uncluttered interface, where the user can show/hide/adapt it to
>     suit their desires.  This is not quite full reality. We have had
>     requests to show/hide the right hand panel and to show/hide the
>     built-in daily reading plan.
>
>     We have also had requests to make it a premier study tool complete
>     with deep linguistic analysis.
>
>     I think to make BD the killer application, we need to address both
>     of these ends of the spectrum.
>
>     Here is where my head is at regarding this:
>     1) The user should be able to show/hide components of BD.
>     2) The user should be able to organize those components as they
>     see fit: side-by-side, tabbed, separate windows, ....
>     3) They shouldn't have to do it each time they start the application.
>
>     Today, for the Bible view, you either get a Multiple Document
>     Interface, aka MDI or a Tabbed Document Interface, TDI. I don't
>     like that dichotomy. And there is no Separate Document Interface,
>     SDI, where each BibleView gets its own top-level window. Sometimes
>     I want the tabs, but other times I want to see two tabs (out of
>     several more), side-by-side. There are times that I'd like to tear
>     off a tab and make it a separate standalone window. (And I
>     imagine, I might want to put it back.)
>
>     The other thing is the notion of plugins. The idea here is that a
>     plugin would be independent from the main application and could be
>     added/removed and shown/hidden at will. Once added and shown, it
>     could be place as above. This probably will satisfy 1).
>
>     It was noted that the NetBeans and Eclipse look and feel get in
>     the way. Largely, I agree. But, they provide these capabilities
>     for free.
>
>     This and solving the rendering problems that Peter noted are the
>     two strategic implementations I have for a 2.0 release.
>
>
> I've been interested recently in the things that made the web a 
> success when other options failed.
>
> One of those things, I think, strangely, was the poor UI controls.
>
> There isn't a tab container, tree view, dialogs (except for yes/no/ok)
> And the upshot of this is that people don't in general need training 
> to use new websites, where as it's common to see people going on 
> word/excel/etc training courses. Good UI design keeps things simple, 
> and I think this is good both for the power user and the beginner.
>
> I would totally support getting rid of MDI and TDI and replacing them 
> with some sort of history/favorites mechanism.
> The study books could probably share the same system too. You can only 
> read one thing at a time, so I think concentrating on 1st class 
> navigation makes sense.
>
> We could have a single input box that we parse on every keypress and 
> give feedback somewhere to explain what we think the user is trying to 
> do. When the user types "Gen 1" we have a status bar say "press return 
> to view Genesis 1". If we can't parse the input as a Bible reference 
> then we change the status text to say "press return to seach for 
> whatever". Much like the Google search box can to much more than 
> search, we empower the BibleDesktop input box.
>
> We could potentialy do something interesting by changing the rendering 
> from HTML to Java2D, or even JavaFX. That way we could overcome the 
> limitation of scrollbars and a pre-populated text box. By only 
> rendering the text of the screen, we could have whole Bible scrolling 
> that was way faster than the current rendering.
>
> Anyway, that was all a bit radical.
>
> Joe.
>
>
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