Archive for the ‘UI Team (Blue)’ Category
MindTouch Skin Support
Keeping Our Skins Healthy
We are deprecating the Ace and Fiesta skins in MindTouch Core/Platform/TCS 10.1 (a.k.a. Pipestone). Ace and Fiesta will continue to ship, however they will no longer be actively maintained (though we will continue to accept community supplied patches). Deuce is now the default and recommended skin. Beech is still in beta and we continue to mature it for production use.
What to do?
If you are currently using Ace or Fiesta and do not wish to upgrade your version of MindTouch, then you don’t need to do anything. If you are planning an upgrade of MindTouch then you should also plan on migrating to Deuce (or Beech once it is ready). Functionality unique to the Ace and Fiesta skins will no longer be supported after migration.
I believe you will find the Deuce skin to be a compelling alternative to the aging Ace and Fiesta skins. And it enables us to focus on delivering a truly exceptional experience. Should you, however, decide to stick with either of the deprecated skins, fear not. We will continue shipping the required files with each subsequent update so that you do not have to do anything. On the flip side, you will also not see new features show up in the user interface. As before, we will accept community patches to Ace and Fiesta through our bug tracker.
As always, please feel free to reach out to me directly (kellya at mindtouch dot com), on the forums or on this blog to make your voice heard.
The Fate of IE6 Support
Because so much of what MindTouch is asked to do is display content and thus spread intelligence around topics, we choose to adopt a philosophy of Progressive Enhancement when choosing which browsers to support. For anyone unfamiliar with the concepts of browser support, Yahoo has done the Web developer world a great service by outlining which browsers their UIs will support and why. Moreover, we at MindTouch will follow Yahoo’s lead in supporting A-Grade browsers when testing and assuring the quality of our products.
Citing the Yahoo standard, in internal memo from Steve Bjorg, our CTO says:
A-grade browsers are identified, capable, modern and common. QA tests all A-grade browsers, and bugs are addressed with high priority (e.g. IE8, Firefox 3.5, …).
X-grade browsers are assumed to be capable and modern. QA does not test, and bugs are not opened against X-grade browsers (e.g Opera, Conqueror, …).
Steve also goes on to mention IE6 specifically which is officially an A-Grade browser for users who are on Windows XP.
Now, on the other hand, I am on a Mac, running Mac OSX 10.6 and I’m addicted to the Chrome browser. I am officially on an X-Grade browser and live with the results. There are times I find myself scratching my head where the editor or page-viewing experience is less cool than it would be if I were on Firefox. But because we have a progressive enhancement methodology here too, I personally don’t feel the effect of missing content, but instead lack a few nice to have features of the A-Grade set. I’m not missing the show. I’m just prefer to sit a little to the side of front and center.
That said, we don’t work in a vacuum. We realize Facebook, Google, heck, even Microsoft have all dropped support for IE6 in one way or another. We welcome feedback from the community. What browsers do you think we should support? Do you agree with the Yahoo YUI standards?
New UI Developer On The Scene
Hey all, my name is Kalid Azad, I’m the new UI Dev for MindTouch!
I got in touch with the company after a tweet regarding a project of mine, which led to an email/call & trip to San Diego to meet the team. San Diego apparently has name-brand sunshine, vs. the generic packaged stuff we get up in Seattle. The team was smart, friendly, down to earth, and it was cool talking about new technologies (git, no SQL style databases) with an atmosphere of curious experimentation. Not every new tech is the right fit, but it’s important to explore the possibilities and know what’s out there.
I’m a fan of MindTouch for a few reasons. First, it’s open source — I’ve worked inside closed corporations, and did a double-take when my first spec was put on a public site. Really? Other people can… read it? Believe it or not, this is mindblowing in other circumstances :). Being able/allowed/encouraged to engage with a community, in the open, from the getgo is really freeing.
Next, I love blogging about math/programming geekery, and was looking for a way to have readers contribute. I like tinkering around with new platforms (tweaking WordPress, etc.) and being able to contribute to a project I’m experimenting with myself is just awesome. I’m keeping a list of little UX features that might be cool on my user page. Comments/feedback/UX ideas are more than welcome.
Last, I like the idea of separating the data (API) from the presentation layer, in that good ol’ MVC pattern. Theoretically, you can have a web interface, gmail-like interface, desktop interface, iphone interface, command-line interface… and it should just all work. Just having the separation gives you the freedom to experiment, which I’m looking forward to doing.
Hrm… about me: I like javascript, jquery, snowboarding, web apps, iphones, TED, math geekery, jiu jitsu, startups, keeping the simple things simple and the complex things possible. Dislikes: Country music, bureaucracy, car doors that get half-closed but not quite so you have to re-open and close them again. In 2010, how does this still happen?!
Back to normal now. Looking forward to working with everyone!
jQuery + Deki = <3;
Do you know javascripts [sic]? Do you work with Dekis [sic] on a daily basis? Then you’ll be glad (?) to know that we have changed access to jQuery in Deki for the fresh upcoming Lyons release.
Previously, we had DekiWiki.$, and then we also had $; now we have DekiWiki.$, $, and Deki.$. What does this all mean? It means the preferred method to use jQuery in your extensions and plugins is now Deki.$. We will maintain backwards compatibility with the deprecated DekiWiki.$, but we cannot guarantee access to $, due to its usage in many different libraries.
Experiment 1:
Deki.$('body').click(function(){alert('ignore me!');});
Experiment 2:
Deki.$(':input').hover(function() { this.value = 'Deki!'; });
Note from the editor: This post makes a lot more sense if you click the first “javascripts” link. Dry British humour at its best!
UI team (blue team) status update
The goal of the UI team for this week was code completion for the major features of the Lyons release. With Guerric’s check-ins over the weekend for page/user properties, we’re very close to that goal. At this point, we’ll start going back against our implemented features and start polishing them up (specifically tagging).
We also started cleaning up our bugs inside Mantis. To start triaging the bugs effectively, we converted all of them against the Lyons release, and started moving them on a case-by-case basis into the “Lyons+” or “future” release set. Our team started off in the neighborhood of around 400 bugs – we’ve gotten it down to about 150 bugs right now. We’ll continue to make judgement calls on what bug fixes’ll make into the Lyons release.
Specific work items, broken down by each team member:
- Guerric:
- Wrap up page properties & user properties UI
- Identify bugs for fixing in Lyons and start fixing them
- Verbage changes to “Page Alerts” to “Page Notifications” (should the PHP side be updated as well?)
- Jessica:
- Design proposal for updating our generic pagination controls
- Notification proposals (user experience, types of data to send)
- Control panel quality check and follow-up on assignments for work items
- Deuce suggestions
- Proposal for user/file hover UI (for incremental)
- Offer polishing proposals for tagging
- Karen:
- Editor bug fixes
- Do a pass on EditPage.php to make sure editor refactoring didn’t affect public entry points
- View source mode for front-end
- Multiple page RSS feed
- Roy:
- CP functionality work items
If you’re running on trunk, the UI will look incredibly messy. Our big goal is to start polishing off the rough edges of the new features, for which there are plenty. As Guerric and I start going through bugs, we’ll open up a process for formally getting suggestions on improving the UI of these features next week.
