Control for changing/reflecting sidebar scope and sort

[dwhly]

The sidebar can reflect many potential views or scopes.

Potentially, showing annotations from:

• The whole document
• The viewport
• A tab or bucket
• A single annotation or a few single annotations (when clicking on overlapping highlights for instance)
• Search results

We need a way to both control this and reflect its state. Last year we began to mockup a few approaches for this, but we never created the issue.

[csillag]

+1

[gergely-ujvari]

+1

[csillag]

Could the last tab perhaps be the Settings Panel? (See #551)

The original plan was to put it into either the user menu, or to control bar, but if we will have a view control, we might as well put it there...

[dwhly]

I'm not sure what you're thinking. You tend to have a good sense of things, so please elaborate.

For me, controls that determine the scope/view and sort of annotations that show in the sidebar are probably fairly specific to that activity. The overall settings would tend to be much more related to the user and the account, and probably belong close to existing controls for the user account. I'm thinking that the current pull down from the user name is as good a place as any. Open to discussion.

[csillag]

The thinking goes like this:

• We can show various different things in the sidebar, which is controlled by a hidden URL.
• The URL (of where we are in the sidebar) is invisible, so the only indication are the controls that we are showing
• This new tab-based control is likely to become the main navigational widget inside the sidebar
• Most of the time, we are navigating between different views of annotations, but there is also a special view for accessing settings. (Which also corresponds to a specific URL, like the various view modes do.)
• Therefore, maybe it would make sense to display this option among the tabs, too.

Admittedly, this is a very technical view of "where we are" in the app; the users might not think this way, so adding a non-scope related option to the scope related ones (just because that is also a possible URL to go inside the sidebar) it might be confusing for them.

[dwhly]

Ah.

This control, and one for sorting the sidebar different ways, are operations on which annotations are visible (in scope) in the sidebar, and how they're sorted when they are.

There are many other "pages" one can imagine for the sidebar: Settings, Profile, Group admin, etc. I think the access for these should be via tabs. One reason is that the space for tabs will be quite limited.

[csillag]

Oh, so we both envisioned a multi-level menu system, probably tabs within tabs.

My plan was:

• Whole document view
• Viewport view
• Bucket view
• Single view
• Search view
• Settings Panel
  • Account/profile settings
  • Various other settings
  • Group editor
  • etc.

If I understand correctly, your plan is:

• Annotations
  • Whole document view
  • Viewport view
  • Bucket view
  • Single view
• Settings
• Profile
• Group admin
• etc

I am fine with either way. The reason I wanted to put the various view modes to top level, and almost everything else inside Settings was that I expect the views to be used much more often than anything else, so I thought that it's better to expose them directly. (This way, the second layer of menu does not have to be visible in these modes, and therefore we are conserving monitor real estate.)

But I am also fine with your menu layout, too; I think it clear. Mine actually took a short-cut to expose the views more directly.

[dwhly]

The vision was 2 pull downs, each with a number of choices. Visually they might be displayed on tabs, though they wouldn't be tabs in the classic sense (i.e. controlling exclusive views).

• Scope/view
  • Document
  • Viewport
  • Tab
  • Single
  • Search results (maybe this deserves its own indicator
• Sort
  • Best
  • Hot
  • Newest
  • Oldest

Separately, there would be other pages we might show in the sidebar. Some of these might be accessed via the user pulldown. For instance, profile, settings, group admin, etc.

[csillag]

I see. So the other pages (profile, settings, group admin, etc) don't get their fixed place in the main navigation menu, on any level. I thought we want to include them, too, either above or below the level of the scope/view switch.

[csillag]

Do we have a mockup which shows

• the scope/view controller
• sort controller
• searchbar
• social filter controller

all together?

[dwhly]

Here is a scan. It shows the search bar, the social view menu and the user/login menu. Also, it shows two annotation controls. One for scope and another for sort. When the search bar is expanded, there are things we can do to temporarily squeeze and get more space.

[csillag]

@dwhly says:

I think when a document is first opened that the view should probably be whole document

[tilgovi]

This is done now?

[dwhly]

Close-- @RawKStar77 is making a few remaining tweaks.

[csillag]

This is implemented now. Closing.