3.0 enhancement: replacing panels with new interaction model

[joseph]

The Panels approach is quite flexible for defining reader interfaces, but it does result in a few problems:

• the Stencil control is quite a hack
• I-Mode is fairly different from the way other readers work, leading to user experience dissonance
• overlaying panels don't really play nice with 'interactive' (scripted) or 'enhanced' (audio/video) books

I've created a branch for prototyping the replacement — interaction-model. It's based on the retirements branch, and is slated to be one of the biggest changes in 3.0. I'm thinking we'll retire panels altogether for 3.0, so any Monocle applications that make heavy use of them might want to stay on the 2.x thread. There's an experimental test (which describes the new model) and a prototype panel called 'Magic'.

Support looks pretty good even for ancient versions of Android, Kindle, etc.

If this change is likely to be a problem for anyone, pipe up in the comments.

[nigelpegg]

This sounds really cool - totally agree on the interaction model.

When you say "panel-less", you mean no panel divs whatsoever? I took a quick look, and seems as though the touch event listening is now happening on the reader (for the start event) and on the pages themselves? Is that right? I'd built a prototype which follows the same interaction model as yours (swipes anywhere to flip pages directionally), but ended up using a 1-div-panel to do so.

[joseph]

Yup, that's right — the listener on the page margins is easy enough, but the listener on the content iframes is tricky. We need to calculate the event coordinates relative to the reader box, whereas we get the events coords relative to the iframe. There's a little hackery involved, mostly because the Android browser sucks.

Anyway, the big advantage of doing this is that you don't have to go into another interface "mode" to select text, or interact with links and video.

[jlbruno]

Playing around with the new interaction model, seems to work well so far. One question: should the new "magic" panels already support inline links?

Currently, clicking a link doesn't seem to follow the link, it seems to just turn the page (depending which side of the page you clicked on).

[joseph]

For some reason I didn't see this question. The answer is the same for all panels: you need to use the Stencil control. Take a look at the stencil test for example code.

[joseph]

For the 3.0 release, 'Magic' is a panel class like the others — the others haven't been removed or deprecated. But they are, I suppose, on notice.

[jlbruno]

Ok, my assumption with the quote from the original ticket of "the Stencil control is quite a hack" was that with 3.0 it was deprecated. My misunderstanding.

[jlbruno]

I was also never able to get Stencil working properly, but that might have been because of ticket #122