welly 3 ideas

[Xi Wang]

a couple of (crazy) ideas about welly 3

* drop support for leopard- & ppc; probably 10.6+/x64 required.

* drop telnet support; mandate ssh for bbs --- it is insane to send
unencrypted passwords and mails over the network. btw, all major bbs
sites should already support ssh, though in different ways, e.g.,
ad-hoc ssh1 from smth, weird ssh2 configuration from ptt.

* detect gb/big5 automatically --- it is boring to specify the
encoding, but not difficult to guess, e.g., using a list of
``welcome'' words to test encoding.

* decouple text rendering from other effects, such as url (underline),
blinking, cursor, etc. one possible idea is to use core animation
(like effect view): draw basic colored texts on a layer; draw url on
another layer; similarly for the rest. btw, you can even use some
quicktime movie as the background (isn't it cool).

* make use of multicore to improve performance --- for example, move
operations like bbs state tracking and ip address extraction/query
into separate threads.

* improve ui, particularly two views: bookmarks and active
connections. any better idea? for example,
- coverflow for bookmarks and tabview for active connections, like welly 2;
- coverflow (or image browser) for both;
- image browser for both, in one unified interface, organized in two groups;
- a popup list for bookmarks and multiple windows for active
connections (one for each), like most editors on mac such as textedit
and xcode (macvim is an exception, which uses tabview).

- xi


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[Xi Wang]

more ideas about ui:

- a popup list for bookmarks and a image browser for active
connections (similar to safari on ipad);

- a popup list for bookmarks and a band of icons (at top or bottom)
for active connections.

comments from sly:

* integrate with url shorteners like bit.ly, tinyurl when pasting long urls.

* automatic image preview (btw, we may simply embed safari, which i
prefer, though quicklook looks cooler)

[Yang Tang]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 8:46 PM, Xi Wang <xi....@gmail.com> wrote:

more ideas about ui:

- a popup list for bookmarks and a image browser for active
connections (similar to safari on ipad);

- a popup list for bookmarks and a band of icons (at top or bottom)
for active connections.

comments from sly:

* integrate with url shorteners like bit.ly, tinyurl when pasting long urls.

suppppport! 

* automatic image preview (btw, we may simply embed safari, which i
prefer, though quicklook looks cooler)

how automatic? feels like the popup-ads on some webpages...

--
TANG Yang
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 5318 8650

[Yang Tang]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Xi Wang <xi....@gmail.com> wrote:

a couple of (crazy) ideas about welly 3

* drop support for leopard- & ppc; probably 10.6+/x64 required.

Fine. Then we can use Grand Central Dispatch.

* drop telnet support; mandate ssh for bbs --- it is insane to send
unencrypted passwords and mails over the network.  btw, all major bbs
sites should already support ssh, though in different ways, e.g.,
ad-hoc ssh1 from smth, weird ssh2 configuration from ptt.

Any overhead if we support telnet?

* detect gb/big5 automatically --- it is boring to specify the
encoding, but not difficult to guess, e.g., using a list of
``welcome'' words to test encoding.

sp!

* decouple text rendering from other effects, such as url (underline),
blinking, cursor, etc.  one possible idea is to use core animation
(like effect view): draw basic colored texts on a layer; draw url on
another layer; similarly for the rest.  btw, you can even use some
quicktime movie as the background (isn't it cool).

orz...

* make use of multicore to improve performance --- for example, move
operations like bbs state tracking and ip address extraction/query
into separate threads.

Cool! Grand Central Dispatch!

* improve ui, particularly two views: bookmarks and active
connections.  any better idea?  for example,
- coverflow for bookmarks and tabview for active connections, like welly 2;
- coverflow (or image browser) for both;
- image browser for both, in one unified interface, organized in two groups;
- a popup list for bookmarks and multiple windows for active
connections (one for each), like most editors on mac such as textedit
and xcode (macvim is an exception, which uses tabview).

Coverflow: looks fancy, but has greater overhead when switching connections.

Popup: good for viewing more than one connection simultaneously, but too scattered. Better if we use a combination of popup and tabview, like Safari or Chrome, that is, we can drag a tab out to make it a popup, or merge popups into tabs.

- xi

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[Yang Tang]

shoot... by ``popup'', i mean ``window''...

- xi

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--
TANG Yang
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 5318 8650

[Li Lu]

Hi folks,

I support the idea of automatic encoding detection. However, removing the telnet support may cause some troubles: most of the KBS sites use telnet for register, and users will not be happy to use a term which cannot create new accounts on mainstream BBS sites. PTT seems to be OK with this choice as it has SSH based registration (said by sto boost orz), but without telnet support most mainland BBS users should use web interface to register. 

What I'm thinking about the functional changes in Welly 3 is that they should make Welly to be intuitive, straightforward, and even a monkey can use it to browse a BBS site. I strongly support the idea of automatic encoding detection because encoding is an annoying problem for new users (mostly green hands) when they use term-based BBS for the first time. (You can imagine what will Sakura say if he connects to PTT with FTerm. ) And without a friendly terminal software they may switch to use Web (But, do not worry about those young men complaining this in 煎饼). A new site book will also be helpful because we have to clarify the usage of SSH connections, and I agree with boost that we should make a connection through SSH by default. Nowadays many stupid users complain about there's no SSH support in Welly. OMG come on.... We need to do something other than giving them a good habit to read the help docs (I gave up on doing this). Maybe we can use SSH as a default connection protocol and make some UI changes in our site book saying that "EVERY CONNECTION WILL USE SSH BY DEFAULT!!!!!!" or "默认SSHï¼Œåˆ«æ‰¾äº†ï¼ ". 

About OS requirement, well, I can tolerate the fact that Welly 1&2 are 10.5 only (no lower, no higher) and Welly 3 is 10.6 only (no lower, no higher). At least, we can say "å¾€å‰ ä¸‰ç™¾å¹´ï¼Œå¾€å Žä¸‰ç™¾å¹´ï¼Œæ²¡ç¬¬äºŒä¸ªæ“ ä½œç³»ç»Ÿèƒ½è·‘Welly i (i \in {1, 2, 3})了". That's not bad actually, and that's the common way Apple solves this kind of problems. 

If we focus on 10.6, we can have some new APIs and cool features such as GCD support or 64 support (this part maybe blocked by GFW), and we should get more documentations on these topics.

I would be happy to discuss any further detail about Welly 3, although I haven't bought a Snow Leopard yet. Meanwhile it is not useless to have some ideas with Welly on iPhone/iP(o/a)d. 

gtCarrera

[Xi Wang]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Yang Tang <tangy...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> * automatic image preview (btw, we may simply embed safari, which i
>> prefer, though quicklook looks cooler)
>
> how automatic? feels like the popup-ads on some webpages...

i think sly means something like fterm or wordpress --- that welly
starts to download/preview an image when the mouse hovers over a url,
without clicking...

[Li Lu]

If the user doesn't want to move his/her right/left hand off the
keyboard to grab the mouse, he/she would probably want to use the URL
mode (Option + Tab). If he/she still likes to find&grab the mouse
before previewing the image (by move the cursor to the URL and click),
why they care about that click?

[Xi Wang]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 5:43 PM, Li Lu <lilu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
> I support the idea of automatic encoding detection. However, removing the
> telnet support may cause some troubles: most of the KBS sites use telnet for
> register, and users will not be happy to use a term which cannot create new
> accounts on mainstream BBS sites. PTT seems to be OK with this choice as it
> has SSH based registration (said by sto boost orz), but without telnet
> support most mainland BBS users should use web interface to register.

you are right. probably we should keep telnet, but use ssh by default..

you can try ssh://b...@ptt.cc and see how it works.

> If we focus on 10.6, we can have some new APIs and cool features such as GCD
> support or 64 support (this part maybe blocked by GFW), and we should get
> more documentations on these topics.

interesting, i didn't think about grand central dispatch. it looks
nice for analyzing bbs sites..

[Xi Wang]

lol. personally i hated fterm/wordpress doing this for me..

btw, how about embedding a safari/webkit window instead of
download+quicklook for preview? first, it solves the gif problem;
second, you can view the image while downloading --- don't have to
wait until the last minute; third, we never get the download+quicklook
code right...

the downside is that i have no idea about the performance overhead.

[Li Lu]

I'm not familiar with the GCD APIs, but by my intuition I think parsing/rendering two different BBS sites can be easily parallelized, since there are nearly no data dependences. 

[Li Lu]

On Apr 19, 2010, at 7:59 PM, Xi Wang wrote:

> lol. personally i hated fterm/wordpress doing this for me..
>
> btw, how about embedding a safari/webkit window instead of
> download+quicklook for preview? first, it solves the gif problem;
> second, you can view the image while downloading --- don't have to
> wait until the last minute; third, we never get the download+quicklook
> code right...

That seems to be a correct approach...

>
> the downside is that i have no idea about the performance overhead.

I'm optimistic about this performance, because WebKit is fast
(relatively, better than other engines), and there are not many
chances to use this module. However, I do care about the new user
interface: The Mac users will get crazy if they find anything is
getting ugly.

[Xi Wang]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Li Lu <lilu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not familiar with the GCD APIs, but by my intuition I think
> parsing/rendering two different BBS sites can be easily parallelized, since
> there are nearly no data dependences.

me neither.. the point is that the task of analyzing sites and
building effect views should be done in separate threads, NOT in the
ui thread as welly 2 does, which causes lags. hey man, here comes
your ppopp topic!

[Li Lu]

If this becomes our PPoPP topic, we'll be f***ed by this conference
this time...

[Xi Wang]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Yang Tang <tangy...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Coverflow: looks fancy, but has greater overhead when switching
>> connections.
>> Popup: good for viewing more than one connection simultaneously, but too
>> scattered. Better if we use a combination of popup and tabview, like Safari
>> or Chrome, that is, we can drag a tab out to make it a popup, or merge
>> popups into tabs.
>
> shoot... by ``popup'', i mean ``window''...

ok, it seems that tabview remains the best ui we can come up with...

[Xi Wang]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Xi Wang <xi....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Yang Tang <tangy...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Coverflow: looks fancy, but has greater overhead when switching
>>> connections.
>>> Popup: good for viewing more than one connection simultaneously, but too
>>> scattered. Better if we use a combination of popup and tabview, like Safari
>>> or Chrome, that is, we can drag a tab out to make it a popup, or merge
>>> popups into tabs.
>>
>> shoot... by ``popup'', i mean ``window''...
>
> ok, it seems that tabview remains the best ui we can come up with...

http://alicekey.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/browser-and-popups-interface-design-by-mockups/#more-676

just FYI. that's a possible way to organize downloads/image preview/ip queries.

[Yang Tang]

so formal... what's the encoding of your email? i can't read the inline chinese characters...

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 5:43 AM, Li Lu <lilu9.cn@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi folks,

I support the idea of automatic encoding detection. However, removing the telnet support may cause some troubles: most of the KBS sites use telnet for register, and users will not be happy to use a term which cannot create new accounts on mainstream BBS sites. PTT seems to be OK with this choice as it has SSH based registration (said by sto boost orz), but without telnet support most mainland BBS users should use web interface to register. 

What I'm thinking about the functional changes in Welly 3 is that they should make Welly to be intuitive, straightforward, and even a monkey can use it to browse a BBS site. I strongly support the idea of automatic encoding detection because encoding is an annoying problem for new users (mostly green hands) when they use term-based BBS for the first time. (You can imagine what will Sakura say if he connects to PTT with FTerm. ) And without a friendly terminal software they may switch to use Web (But, do not worry about those young men complaining this in 煎饼). A new site book will also be helpful because we have to clarify the usage of SSH connections, and I agree with boost that we should make a connection through SSH by default. Nowadays many stupid users complain about there's no SSH support in Welly. OMG come on.... We need to do something other than giving them a good habit to read the help docs (I gave up on doing this). Maybe we can use SSH as a default connection protocol and make some UI changes in our site book saying that "EVERY CONNECTION WILL USE SSH BY DEFAULT!!!!!!" or "默认SSHï¼Œåˆ«æ‰¾äº†ï¼ ". 

About OS requirement, well, I can tolerate the fact that Welly 1&2 are 10.5 only (no lower, no higher) and Welly 3 is 10.6 only (no lower, no higher). At least, we can say "å¾€å‰ ä¸‰ç™¾å¹´ï¼Œå¾€å Žä¸‰ç™¾å¹´ï¼Œæ²¡ç¬¬äºŒä¸ªæ“ ä½œç³»ç»Ÿèƒ½è·‘Welly i (i \in {1, 2, 3})了". That's not bad actually, and that's the common way Apple solves this kind of problems. 

If we focus on 10.6, we can have some new APIs and cool features such as GCD support or 64 support (this part maybe blocked by GFW), and we should get more documentations on these topics.

I would be happy to discuss any further detail about Welly 3, although I haven't bought a Snow Leopard yet. Meanwhile it is not useless to have some ideas with Welly on iPhone/iP(o/a)d. 

gtCarrera

[Xi Wang]

he was trying to come up with some jokes, but, apple mail sometimes
screws up --- the actual encoding of his email is utf-8, but the mail
header (that you can find from the original text) from gt says it's
iso-8859-1.

you know how i read his email...

1. paste the original text out ("show original")

2. write a python script as follows
from quopri import *
print decodestring('''[paste-the-original-text-here]''')

3. run the script..

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 1:05 AM, Yang Tang <tangy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> so formal... what's the encoding of your email? i can't read the inline
> chinese characters...
>

[Junliang Liu]

What the hell are these terrible alien words...

2010/4/20 Li Lu <lilu9.cn@gmail.com>

Hi folks,

I support the idea of automatic encoding detection. However, removing the telnet support may cause some troubles: most of the KBS sites use telnet for register, and users will not be happy to use a term which cannot create new accounts on mainstream BBS sites. PTT seems to be OK with this choice as it has SSH based registration (said by sto boost orz), but without telnet support most mainland BBS users should use web interface to register. 

What I'm thinking about the functional changes in Welly 3 is that they should make Welly to be intuitive, straightforward, and even a monkey can use it to browse a BBS site. I strongly support the idea of automatic encoding detection because encoding is an annoying problem for new users (mostly green hands) when they use term-based BBS for the first time. (You can imagine what will Sakura say if he connects to PTT with FTerm. ) And without a friendly terminal software they may switch to use Web (But, do not worry about those young men complaining this in 煎饼). A new site book will also be helpful because we have to clarify the usage of SSH connections, and I agree with boost that we should make a connection through SSH by default. Nowadays many stupid users complain about there's no SSH support in Welly. OMG come on.... We need to do something other than giving them a good habit to read the help docs (I gave up on doing this). Maybe we can use SSH as a default connection protocol and make some UI changes in our site book saying that "EVERY CONNECTION WILL USE SSH BY DEFAULT!!!!!!" or "默认SSHï¼Œåˆ«æ‰¾äº†ï¼ ". 

About OS requirement, well, I can tolerate the fact that Welly 1&2 are 10.5 only (no lower, no higher) and Welly 3 is 10.6 only (no lower, no higher). At least, we can say "å¾€å‰ ä¸‰ç™¾å¹´ï¼Œå¾€å Žä¸‰ç™¾å¹´ï¼Œæ²¡ç¬¬äºŒä¸ªæ“ ä½œç³»ç»Ÿèƒ½è·‘Welly i (i \in {1, 2, 3})了". That's not bad actually, and that's the common way Apple solves this kind of problems. 

If we focus on 10.6, we can have some new APIs and cool features such as GCD support or 64 support (this part maybe blocked by GFW), and we should get more documentations on these topics.

I would be happy to discuss any further detail about Welly 3, although I haven't bought a Snow Leopard yet. Meanwhile it is not useless to have some ideas with Welly on iPhone/iP(o/a)d. 

gtCarrera

On Apr 19, 2010, at 3:10 PM, Yang Tang wrote:

[Junliang Liu]

I don't think popup way is better than tab view in watching multiple bbs simultaneously. For me, using cmd+num to switch between sites is much faster.

2010/4/20 Xi Wang <xi....@gmail.com>

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Xi Wang <xi....@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Yang Tang <tangyang.cn@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Coverflow: looks fancy, but has greater overhead when switching
>>> connections.
>>> Popup: good for viewing more than one connection simultaneously, but too
>>> scattered. Better if we use a combination of popup and tabview, like Safari
>>> or Chrome, that is, we can drag a tab out to make it a popup, or merge
>>> popups into tabs.
>>
>> shoot... by ``popup'', i mean ``window''...
>
> ok, it seems that tabview remains the best ui we can come up with...

[Junliang Liu]

I think we should consider pre-downloading attachments while the user is reading the post? So if s/he intends to quickview the attachment later, we can respond quickly.

2010/4/20 Junliang Liu <tale...@gmail.com>

[Junliang Liu]

About the pre-downloading attachment, we can use the underline to serve as a progress bar, and make it shiny when the downloading is done. What's more, the user could drag out a link to save the file directly, or holding opt+drag to save all cached files. We should use hash-table to avoid duplicate downloading.

Another idea is to auto-detect long posts, and download the entire post in background. After done, a small pop-up should appear at the bottom of the window, and user can click it to put it into full-size, which enable them reading the entire post freely (while using scrolling, and no need to worry about the lag). The point is that this procedure should be transparent to the user. (Of course, the post downloader interface should get enhanced and enable the colored rendering)

[Xi Wang]

i love these prefetch ideas...

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 2:35 AM, Junliang Liu <tale...@gmail.com> wrote:
> About the pre-downloading attachment, we can use the underline to serve as a
> progress bar, and make it shiny when the downloading is done. What's more,
> the user could drag out a link to save the file directly, or holding
> opt+drag to save all cached files. We should use hash-table to avoid
> duplicate downloading.
>
> Another idea is to auto-detect long posts, and download the entire post in
> background. After done, a small pop-up should appear at the bottom of the
> window, and user can click it to put it into full-size, which enable them
> reading the entire post freely (while using scrolling, and no need to worry
> about the lag). The point is that this procedure should be transparent to
> the user. (Of course, the post downloader interface should get enhanced and
> enable the colored rendering)
>
> 2010/4/20 Junliang Liu <tale...@gmail.com>
>>
>> I think we should consider pre-downloading attachments while the user is
>> reading the post? So if s/he intends to quickview the attachment later, we
>> can respond quickly.
>>
>> 2010/4/20 Junliang Liu <tale...@gmail.com>
>>>
>>> I don't think popup way is better than tab view in watching multiple bbs
>>> simultaneously. For me, using cmd+num to switch between sites is much
>>> faster.
>>>
>>> 2010/4/20 Xi Wang <xi....@gmail.com>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Xi Wang <xi....@gmail.com> wrote:

>>>> > On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Yang Tang <tangy...@gmail.com>

[Junliang Liu]

Here's another idea of using the pop-ups. When the user browses a post, he can drag the post to create a small pop-up tab on the bottom of the UI. Later, for e.g., the user start writing a long post, he may want to take a look at these previous viewed posts (now they are stored in the pop-up tabs). The user can move his mouse over a popup tag, and an enlarged view of corresponding post (of course, should be cached by Welly aforehand) should pop up. This view would hide if the mouse go away. If the user want to watch the post while writing, he can drag the pop-up tab out to create an independent window.

This function may be useful if you are writing post which need reference of multiple posts.

In addition, the pop-up tabs can go across different sites.

It may be a nice idea that user can also temporally store the content of the post he's currently editing into a popup. Then the user can leave the edit mode for a while, doing other stuffs, and then come back to edit mode, just drag the previous stored content back, and continue editing it.

2010/4/20 Junliang Liu <tale...@gmail.com>

[Xi Wang]

one more note about ip query: we may invoke the command "whois [ip]"
instead of shipping an insanely huge database with welly..

the only downside is that it's english only, which doesn't seem to be
a big problem (google translate? hah).

>>>>> > On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Yang Tang <tangy...@gmail.com>