Sketch for TabbedSinglePageMode for TiddlyWiki
Jeremy Ruston
http://jermolene.com/2008/11/14/tabbedsinglepagemode-for-tiddlywiki/
Apologies for the link, it's probably the sort of thing I should have
posted directly to the group, but blogging it made it easier to
include the pictures properly.
Cheers
Jeremy
------------
SinglePageMode is a typically neat little TiddlyWiki plugin created by
Eric Shulman. It restores the more conventional wiki behaviour of
having a single page open at once, so that clicking on a link replaces
the current page, rather than inserting it below, as TiddlyWiki
usually does.
Eric's plugin has been deservedly highly popular. It seems that for a
significant proportion of situations/users, the default TiddlyWiki
behaviour of having multiple tiddlers at once is just too complicated.
Having a community plugin to 'fix' this is a great solution, allowing
TiddlyWiki users to choose which behaviour they prefer.
But, from an interface perspective, one of the things I find troubling
about the current implementation of SinglePageMode is that it rather
takes away the whole point of TiddlyWiki: after all, it started out as
an experiment in having multiple wiki pages at once, with a view to
making it easier to refactor content between pages. It's also
frustrating to have to have two separate modes of operation, with
slightly inconsistent behaviour.
I've given quite a lot of thought to how one might somehow unify these
two modes, to give the clarity of single page mode without giving up
on the ability to quickly flick between multiple open tiddlers. I just
came across some sketches buried in an old virtual machine from 2006
that show one approach that still looks like it might be interesting.
(continues with illustrations on
http://jermolene.com/2008/11/14/tabbedsinglepagemode-for-tiddlywiki/)
--
Jeremy Ruston
mailto:jer...@osmosoft.com
http://www.tiddlywiki.com
Eric Shulman
This idea is very similar to the tabbed tiddlers display you get with
http://visualtw.ouvaton.org/VisualTW.html#TiddlersBarPlugin
Two interesting feature differences:
* Your sketch has the tabs vertically oriented along the left side,
while Pascal's plugin arranges them in the more familiar horizontal
orientation. Both approaches seem like they work reasonable well, and
the choice of one over the other might just be a matter of personal
taste.
* The behavior you've outlined includes an automatic 'mouseover' popup
to view content from another tab without actually switching to that
tab. This is would be very cool... and I expect it is relatively easy
to do using a webkit-based browser. Nonetheless, it would be a shame
if access to such "coolness" were limited (at least for the near term)
to users of Safari or Chrome. Perhaps without the scaling effect it
could be done on other browers (maybe using opacity/alpha CSS to
include a 'ghosting' effect with partial transparency?). Still, I
wonder how cross-browser compatible that code could ever be... It
might become a morass of ugly platform-specific hacks. Ewww!
thoughts?
-e
Jeremy Ruston
> while Pascal's plugin arranges them in the more familiar horizontal
> orientation. Both approaches seem like they work reasonable well, and
> the choice of one over the other might just be a matter of personal
> taste.
for having more items, and longer titles.
I think of it as being like a rolodex, something that you riffle
through. Maybe it should have been called RolodexMode
> * The behavior you've outlined includes an automatic 'mouseover' popup
> to view content from another tab without actually switching to that
> tab. This is would be very cool... and I expect it is relatively easy
> to do using a webkit-based browser. Nonetheless, it would be a shame
> if access to such "coolness" were limited (at least for the near term)
> to users of Safari or Chrome. Perhaps without the scaling effect it
> could be done on other browers (maybe using opacity/alpha CSS to
> include a 'ghosting' effect with partial transparency?). Still, I
> wonder how cross-browser compatible that code could ever be... It
> might become a morass of ugly platform-specific hacks. Ewww!
sentence. I'm pretty sure that this idea could be implemented very
easily on 2005-era browsers, and I'd be really interested to see it
done that way.
And by the way, Firefox 3.1 (now in beta) also runs Cecily perfectly;
it's the fact that those features are coming to every desktop so soon
that makes them so exciting to me.
Cheers
Jeremy.
> thoughts?
>
> -e