Tab-completion [WAS: New Robot from NPG]
Nick Stenning
Neylon<camero...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Euan describes a reference management Robot that has been put together
> at:
>
> http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2009/07/igor_a_google_wave_robot_to_ma.html
This looks interesting: the integration with CiteULike/Connotea is
particularly impressive. Just from watching the video, though, it
looks like Igor can't currently cope with renumbering references on
the fly -- although I might be wrong: it's difficult to tell without
being able to play with it myself =).
The only thing that occurs to me: there's still a lot of typing going
on -- certainly nowhere near as much as if you had to enter all these
references yourself, but I can't help wondering if it would be
possible to implement tab completion or something similar in Wave. A
naive consideration would suggest it would be eminently doable, since
updates to the Wave are transmitted character-by-character to the
Robots, as with any other user, right? So all you need to do then is
spot a tab character after non-whitespace, or something similar. (Or
have I got this wrong, and the DOCUMENT_CHANGED event only fires when
you hit "Done"?)
Perhaps a "Tabby" robot would be possible, which communicates with
other robots (embedding YAML/JSON/RDF in the Wave -- is this
possible?). Other robots tell Tabby what patterns they're capable of
expanding (so, in the case of Igor, something like "(cite<TAB>" ... )
and then Tabby monitors the wave and fires calls to those other robots
(again through embedding something unseen in the Wave, perhaps?) when
it detects a registered pattern.
I'd be up for building something like this if a) it were possible and
b) I had an account. Again, any insight from people who understand the
APIs better than I do (which is probably most of you) would be much
appreciated.
-N
Euan Adie
you press "done" or move onto a new document which is why references
don't get renumbered immediately.
Good point about tab completion being a desirable feature.
> Or have I got this wrong, and the DOCUMENT_CHANGED event only fires when you hit "Done"
Bit of both ;) it doesn't fire character by character, it transmits
batches of changes to the robot periodically while the document is
being actively edited.
> embedding YAML/JSON/RDF in the Wave -- is this possible?
(key, value, text range) on each blip.
Not sure what you meant Tabby would do though - why wouldn't robots
just register for DOCUMENT_CHANGED updates and check for potential tab
completion spots themselves?
Another issue is that you don't have control over text selection so
I'm not sure what tab completion would look like in a Wave (how does
the robot modify the robot to give the user a list of choices matching
the text they've entered?)
On Jul 27, 10:37 am, Nick Stenning <n...@whiteink.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 08:42, Cameron
>
>
> > Euan describes a reference management Robot that has been put together
> > at:
>