main menu doesn’t fit on ipad

[dobkeratops]

Currently the main menu doesn’t quite fit on an iPad screen , and it won’t allow scrolling EDIT I now see I can use split screen to force it to use a compact menu in the side , But I’m not sure most people will think of that Maybe you could concatenate some of the top level options into an “advanced” drop down? later I almost imagine unified/search doing the job of explore .. There’s various ways it could be streamlined I do still enjoy using the site on an iPad.. suits the relaxed “kill a bit of time constructively” use case.

Split screen workaround ..

[bbernhard]

Many thanks for reporting! I'll look into that next :)

[bbernhard]

just changed the main menu slightly, please let me know if it's better now :)

[dobkeratops]

Haven’t seen the menu fix but I used the workaround to login , and I’ve been trying out free labelling in unified mode.. this is great to have . Hopefully gathering annotated examples of label suggestions will help the curated label list aswell

Some feedback:-

(1) would be nice to be able to search for the unlabelled images in unified browse mode

(2) I note the label entry (in unified mode) doesn’t allow / , so I’ve reverted to using “or” here (eg “sea or river” “woodchips or soil” etc maybe these can become aliases eventually ; generally I think the / is helpful for combining because it will be easier to parse. I’ve also made a few explicit plural labels (eg crowd, trees etc) ; these again could be aliased.

You might have the option of using unified mode to replace label entry now , which would simplify the whole UI but you can think about what will make the whole tool more approachable overall .
(Personally I think introducing the user to unified mode straight away would be easier than figuring out setting up and searching tasks... the complexity moves from the menu and workflow into the unified mode, but the unified mode makes it easier to annotate comprehensively , and choose the high priority objects first)

The label shortcuts in label entry are useful . ( what if you right side of the screen could be toggled between label shortcuts and properties?)

[dobkeratops]

Got an issue with the unified mode getting stuck on loading ( it displays the oops image in the work area and loading spinning icon in the label list) .. I wanted to try logging out to refresh (because it works on a spare older iPad where it’s not logged in) but I can’t find a way to do that .. maybe it would be possible to add a logout button somewhere

[dobkeratops]

Ok more info on this issue:- (The unified annotation view getting stuck on loading, displaying the “oops” image)

[1] it broke on the ipad after I made a settings change - changing the workspace area from small to medium . Restoring the area to medium didn’t seem to help

[2] it still works fine on a spare iPad where I have never logged in, and never changed the workspace size

[3] I just logged in on the spare iPad (no workspace size change) and it works fine [4] it’s also broken in the desktop , where it’s logged in and I’ve always had it with medium workspace size

[5] it works fine on the same desktop machine in a different browser (Firefox vs chrome) where6] I have never logged in or changed the size (obviously each browser has its own independent cached settings)

[6] on the desktop I can use the logout submenu item fine, but that doesn’t fix it I see there has been a logout option all along, it just can’t be accessed on the iPad screen (its not visible in the side version of the main menu )

[7] changing the workspace size back to the small default on the desktop , and logging out , does not fix it .. so at this point I can’t say if it was logging in, or the size change that breaks it (once broken it seems to persist)

[8] works fine on google chrome on the same iPad (again confirming its not the specific device.. new browser on the same device without having had the size setting accessed works fine)

Perhaps it’s something to do with it trying to request a different version of the image when the workspace size is changed?

[bbernhard]

Many thanks for the detailed bug report - very much appreciated!

You are spot on with your failure analysis ;) It's indeed related to the workspace setting. It seems to be a javascript error..unfortunately the workspace settings weren't covered by autotests, so this bug slipped through. But as I can now trigger the error myself, I can fix it - thanks a lot for help!

Hopefully I can fix that today (or tomorrow). I'll let you know, once it's fixed :)

Thanks!

[dobkeratops]

Awesome , and I have workarounds in the meantime

[bbernhard]

should be fixed now. Please let me know, in case you still see the error :)

[dobkeratops]

That’s great - it’s working fine , I’ve been able to change the setting and it still works

[dobkeratops]

Some suggestions to leave here (I’ll make another thread maybe)

Imagine - as a way of personally motivating (seeing your work accumulate)...

Some kind of history on the user profile, eg being able to go back over the images you personally annotated Same thing for uploads (although you might have this covered by the collections system... you could just make a default user collection selected whenever you upload without an explicit collection)

It could be a special search term (“my annotations”, “anotator=‘’” perhaps) with a shortcut from the login page to launch it

2 related ideas... user preference label list - customise the label addition page shortcuts

Default search term - filled in the browse modes - a way for a user to gravitate toward a field of interest (like food ,or streets for self driving cars , or people)

[dobkeratops]

One comment about the unified mode: The autocomplete lockup becomes more problematic because you can become stuck with work which you then lose by pressing refresh

I would advise disabling the autocomplete in this view, unless there’s a tweet that can reduce this hazard

[bbernhard]

One comment about the unified mode: The autocomplete lockup becomes more problematic because you can become stuck with work which you then lose by pressing refresh

That's again the issue where the autocompletion freezes the browser, right? I was hoping that the last fix (~2 weeks ago) finally fixed the issue once and for all. :/

Do you see the issue both on your PC and your tablet? Just out of interest: Which browser are you using?

As a quick fix, I could temporarily disable the autocompletion. Looks like the autocompletion library that I am using can't handle that many entries :/

[dobkeratops]

I’ve been using the iPad mostly lately(safari) .. back to unified mode with free label annotation. Perhaps I should try other browsers , but I know it would lockup on the desktop under chrome aswell

It’s intermittent .. sometimes it’s ok. I can get into the habit of adding a new label first to reduce work loss .. sometimes it’s ok. Overall unified mode is worth using

Not sure what the best way to proceed is . I’ll make a note about free labels aswell

[bbernhard]

Thanks for the info!

I was now able to reproduce the issue again in my local environment and I think I have now found the root cause for the issue. (there are certain search queries that return hundreds (sometimes thousands) of results that all need to be HTML rendered..which is quite slow. I've changed that now to render at max. 10 items and if there are more search results the dropdown will show as 11th element: "please narrow down your search". This hopefully fixes the freezing browser issue)

I am testing the fix a bit more, and if everything works, I'll probably push it to production tomorrow. I'll let you know once its live :)

[dobkeratops]

Right I can see the search mode has its own issues. Would this fix filter through to the unified mode label entry ( could it be the same sort of thing .. excessive number of potential completions ) .. maybe this can be tweaked by just limiting the number it shows

[bbernhard]

I've pushed the changes to production. Please let me know in case the issue appears again.

(I've applied the same fix to all the auto-complete input fields...so there shouldn't be any browser freezing anymore. keeping my fingers crossed)

[dobkeratops]

Seems better now .. I haven’t had it freezing anymore

[dobkeratops]

Mockup of maximised world area in unified mode (iPad screenshot) .. I would suggest temporarily sacrificing the properties box later recover it by toggling? .. possibly dividing the space on the left, or making it a popup .. but for the moment Free Labelling gives us the ability to easily combine the most important properties in an aliased label

The current propitious look like this: - the work area is typically just 1/4 of the screen area

The current layout is probably ok on a big desktop PC screen ... but the iPad is great for relaxed use. The aspect ratio is slightly different.. most desktop monitors are 16:9 but the iPad is closer to 4:3

[bbernhard]

Many thanks for the feedback - very much appreciated!

The unified mode has definitely a lot of room for improvements...to be honest, I was never fully happy with the layout in the first place, but at some point I decided to just kick it out in the hope to get some more feedback. So any feedback on that is really great! :)

Something that's on my mind for quite some time is: WebAssembly.

Qt (my go-to framework for everything GUI related) has recently added WebAssembly support. I am wondering whether it's worth it to rewrite (parts) of the functionality so that it can run natively on the desktop but also can be compiled to WebAssembly...

[dobkeratops]

It’s definitely good enough to use, and it is already the best mode. so it was well worth just running with it. We still had the existing modes as fallbacks.

Webassembly does give exciting possibilities. I’ve already used rust/OpenGL with emacripten a bit , and rusts webassembly support is similar. I definitely like their idea of blurring the divide between native and web appiclications.

I suppose you could think about an advanced next gen annotation tool to justify the switch .with just a few little tweeks the existing unified mode would suffice until an advanced tool became available ( my wishlist would be: (I)unified browse to include unlabelled images, (Ii)ability to enter free labels with underscores, slashed and brackets, and (iii)the bigger work area).

So many ways it could go, whilst you could keep the existing “good enough” tools as a fallback