[bt-devel] New passage selector proposal

Wed Apr 18 16:40:17 MST 2012

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On 19.04.2012 01:14, Patrick Zimmermann wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> since IRC doesn't seem to be a good place for feature proposal and
> feedback, I repost this as an email. This should give everyone more
> time to respond.

Yeah... sorry, I wasn't actually there for long.

> I made up a new GUI for selecting passages and doing searches in
> BT. I would like your opinion on this before starting with the
> implementation to prevent extra work.
> 
> The basic idea behind all this is to provide a quicker workflow for
> accessing bible passages. Passages of which I may or may not know
> the exact verse, i.e. I have to search.
> 
> http://devel.bibletime.info/images/0/09/SelectorProposal.png
> 
> Any feedback is very welcome.

I very much like your proposal and think that regarding UI design of
BibleTime this is the best path to follow. The current search dialog
is too previous-century.

However I have some questions:

1) When exactly does the search (proposals) screen appear? Is it that
when I click on a specific a part of the key (book/chapter/verse) then
it jumps to the selection screen. How do I start searching for regular
text? This was a bit vaguely described.
2) How does one use the selector bar to quickly switch to
   a) a different passage from anywhere else in the open work(s)?
   b) the previous/next book/chapter/verse?
3) Is it comfortable for the user who uses only keyboard/mouse/touch?
4) I didn't quite understand the Add/Replace menu. Please clarify how
it works.
5) Why double-click on the search results? Can't this be done in
single click, i.e. something like google.com does that the search
result item title is single-clickable, and the match is shown below
the search result item and is not clickable?
6) What exactly are "Search mode" and "Auto search mode"?
7) Does adding/replacing works in the search screen or the regular
display screen constitute a new history item in the back/forward chain?

Some proposals:
1) I think the search screen also needs a way to quickly select ALL
installed works for search. And we need to figure out what to do after
clicking on a search result in this case.
2) It were good if it were possible from the main window to open a new
(empty) subwindow with no works open but only displaying a "search all
works" screen which were like a "home"-page.

***

Regarding implementing all of this I'm afraid you'll run into several
obstacles which require extensive amounts of refactoring in both the
frontend and backend. The simplest way might as well just to disable
all existing frontend code for the display windows and start
implementing the new display windows from scratch.

Somewhere hidden between all the legacy spaghetti code you might also
bump into a serious issue (and a bug) about how to handle the display
of works in parallel if the passages of those works provide don't
fully overlap (e.g. if one work has new testament only, but the other
has old testament only).

In general I think this would be a huge refactoring effort, much
larger than refactoring the configuration system was. On the other
hand I hope that I don't discourage you to try something I have
previously failed to do by myself alone.

I will be extremely busy and mostly away during the following month(s)
and summer, but after that I might occasionally have some time to help
you implement/test all of this.

God bless!
Jaak
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