Embedding a webpage in the blog to get early feedback
I’m trying a new venue to get early feedback for UI design…: this blog.
I’ve been trying to reproduce an effect similar to Eclipse for web-apps, where Views can be dragged across different viewports. Using jquery UI, and after a few lines of javascript, I get the following:
Open in New Window
Please comment on bugs, usability, desired features, and if you think that embedding webpages in our blog is a good idea/practice for that kind of tests…
I find it to be very usable. Beyond that, the quality of dragging tabs within the embedded webpage is phenomenal. It’s fast and smooth. Surprisingly good.
Viewports don’t appear to be working in firefox 3.5, but appear correctly in Safari 4.0
Nicely done! Can you share this approach through a relatively liberal license? I would love to re-use it with premission in some of my code.
@Everyone: Thanks a lot for your feedback !!! I’ve put a more current version on http://people.csail.mit.edu/sacha/tests/perspective_20090722. Note that I didn’t have cross-platform compatibility in mind (so far) when designing this plugin (for instance, it uses some javascript-1.7-isms), but it should work with Firefox… Comments are welcome, as always (just reply to this post).
@Ed: Thanks for the Feedback. It was also quite straightforward to write because it build a lot on top of jquery and jqueryUI
@Louis: Thanks a lot. Interesting: I just tried it on FF3.5b4pre on my Ubuntu Box and it worked fine. Do you get an error message ? My best guess is that I developed using FF3 and Firebug, but I didn’t quite clean up the console.debug() statement, who probably cause an error in FF without Firebug.
@Gene: It’s too early/buggy to speak about an official “release” (like on the jQuery website) but I plan on improving and using this framework for the upcoming version of NB, the communal annotation website project I’ve been working on (for which we greatly benefited from your XLibris paper by the way, so thanks for your visionary work that inspired students more than 10 years later !!!).
I’ve put the version I have here, if you’d like to try it with your project. I’ve put an MIT licence to it, as we usually do for Haystack material. Feedback is welcome, as always. I’ve also extended this view framework with some cool MVC patterns / smooth transitions from one view to another and custom widgets but I’m still wrestling with the API. I’ll try to come up with something cleaner in a close future, though.