[sword-devel] Wiki front end comparison

Peter von Kaehne refdoc at gmx.net
Mon Mar 2 06:43:38 MST 2009


Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> Quoting Barry Drake <bdrake at crosswire.org>:
> 
>>
>> I suggest an additional column (or more).  'Footnote Handling' marked
>> as 'complete' or 'limited' (or somesuch).  Another point that we might
>> want to consider is navigation on a scale of 0 to 5.  BibleCS might be
>> around 2, and Xiphos around 5 ....  and so on ....
> 
> I wouldn't put too specific statements in the table. It should be enough
> to have standard marks: Yes, no, partial etc. If there's something which
> must be said it can be put into a footnote under that table. Quite many
> feature comparisons are made this way.
> 
> Also, I don't like putting features into columns. It's much easier to
> read the tables if every table has apps in columns. Rows (features) can
> then be added more freely. It's enough to use shortened names for apps,
> like BT, Xiph, SfW etc.
> 
> The OS icons are not needed. There may be difference between Win9x
> support, Win2000 support, XP support and 64bit Vista support. They can
> be put to rows.
> 
> Then the tables would look like this with icons instead of text marks:
> 
>            BT Xiph SfW
> footnotes  V   V    v(1)
> feature2   X   X    V
>     (1): Doesn't support long footnotes
> 
> --Eeli Kaikkonen
> 

I think the value of this page is that it contains all raw data - so the
1221 character limitation is useful (but what an odd number!?) Any final
user oriented page would abstract this,

Putting data into rows and frontends into columns is so obvious that I
feel now stupid. It is probably too late to fix this for the wiki -
unless you, Eeli, volunteer - the amount has become too much.

Wrt rating of interfaces - sorry, Barry I really can not see how we can
put this anywhere without the most almighty flame war. It is neither
worth it (having yet another fall out over it) nor is there a
"scientific" standard for ease of use which we can simply employ, is there?

I mean, I (and presumably you) know what I (you) find easy and what
I(You) find difficult and what I (yoy) find braindead, but a) I am (you
are) not a usability scientist and b) I value my colleagues at CrossWire
too much to not put up a simplistic and scathing mark x out of
5/10/whatever, but rather email the relevant team - I like your search
capabilities, but this and that is a bit odd, you could make it easier
like this bla bla.

Personally I have found a lot of "well hidden" functionality in a number
of frontends during this trawl, which I guess could be made a lot easier
 to find or use. Some people will get emails in the next days.

Peter







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