Re: [Gzz] Re: Is xupdf reasonable?!

[Matti Katila]

[ Hi Narciso, cc to you because of I referred to your mail ]


On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, Tuomas Lukka wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 10:02:25AM +0200, Matti Katila wrote:
>>> Well, Janne noticed that there's a lot of things influenced to 
>>> bidirectional links and left/rigth directions.
>>> 
>>> Basically xupdf is pdf viewer and what we have? Only UI with links.
>>> Even bib entrys have more information than xupdf has in links. 
>>> 
>>> There isn't way to tell to user: "Mmmkay, this is referred from that 
>>> article". We can only say that there exist a link between articles.
>>> OTOH, we can not say that article refers to another or have we made the 
>>> link ourselfs.
>> 
>> These are very good points, and we do need to address them before 
>> the article deadline.
>> 
>> 1) The idea is that the user can also write short notes and link them.
>>    This way, the link types should become more apparent. I'll be implementing
>>    this ASAP.
>> 
>> 2) At least my view of xupdf so far is that it's more for "personal" use,
>>    so that you know the articles you're browsing.
>
> Forgot to make explicit the question: do you think this will be enough?

You have said that beginner and professional users should have the same ui
and usability. To your 2) view of xupdf if someone sit to your chair and 
starts browsing the articles with xupdf - he doesn't know what the link 
means. Ok, talked with Asko about this and we can use different fillets 
and colors something like here:

http://www.workpractice.com/trigg/thesis-chap4.html

..but what we get?  "What does this color means?", "What this fillet 
means?" - We still have only 'links'. And if we limit the freedom by 
chosing left links for history and rigth links for future we are 
not using xupdf as freely as we could. 

Asko's second idea was that this is only talking about different views.
I don't want to buy that. xupdf for professionals and extended-xupdf with 
tiptools could be a way to 'hide' metainformation to buoys for beginners. 
Or what if there is small window which shows the bib entry? I hate 
tiptools anyway.. 

> Or what would you like to see?

I think our revolutionary interface is what I want to see but is it 
enough? Can we make it better, can't we? Is the left/rigth thing only for 
cognitive map (helps memorizing things)? 

--snip--
[cognitive map]

Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:18:16 +0200
From: Narciso Gonzalez-Vega <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Gzz and buoys.

Hi Matti,

I do not have anything against you sending these messages to your
mailing list.

..clipeticlap..

Cognitive map refers to how people store spatial information in the
memory. In the case of UIs
you can think about how people memorise them, e.g., the commands in the
menu bar, the icons for
different functions, status bar, and so on. The main problem with this
kind of concept is that different
people might use different ways to memorise the spatial and graphical
information provided by the UI,
hence generalisations become very tricky at the user level.

--snap--


> We have a revolutionary interface; how do we present it?

That's the question.


   -Matti