[ansel] Re: Your Horde Apps

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Hey, I hope you don't mind if I cc: the Ansel list on this, to include other
developers.

Quoting Ben Chavet <ben at chavet.net>:

> I'm thinking about moving to ansel for my website, but I'd like to address
> the useability first.  Do you have any plans or ideas for the UI?  Here are
> some of my thoughts:

I've actually gone and implemented a bunch of my plans; I think Ansel's UI has
already gotten much better since we started this thread. But some of these
still sound very good. :)

> For the gallery view:
>
>   - group galleries by owner (ie "User X's Galleries") with "My Galleries"
>     being listed first.
>
>   - IMHO it's not very importanto to be able to sort by name/description.
>     Removing this functionality would allow the gallery list to be less
>     list-like and more icon-like (kind of like my site).  Of course, this
>     could be a setting in conf.php or a preference.

My main concern with stuff like that is how it'll scale to large numbers of
galleries. I don't have a real objection to making that change, though.

>   - There should be some sort of pager feature, so you don't have to load
>     ALL of the thumbnails in a gallery at once.  I have to think about this
>     sort of thing because I have a slow server & most of my users are on
>     dialup.  It would take a very long time to load a gallery with a bunch
>     of pictures in it.

Yes, definitely. This is just something that I haven't gotten around to yet.

>   - Along with the pager feature, the user should be able to set how many
>     thumbnails to view at once (with a system max).  Again, this is thinking
>     about dialup users & slower servers.

Also definitely.

> For the 'Add Image' form:
>
>   - Allow adding more than one image at a time.  This is a *huge* time saver.
>     My original photo album implementation only allowed one image at a time
>     and it took forever to load even a handful of photos.

Yes. There's actually already the xppublish support, btw; it's for a limited
audience, so we should definitely add other solutions, but this is a *very*
slick way of uploading multiple photos from WinXP.

>   - Maybe we could have one form to load one image, keeping the ability to
>     edit it before adding it, and another form to load multiple images.

That makes a lot of sense to me. The batch form could include the same
thumbnail-size preview, and caption fields too, even.

> Miscellaneous:
>
>   - Since we are storing the full original image, I think it should be more
>     accessible.  Maybe a link while viewing the screen image.

Yes, it's already in docs/TODO. :)

>   - A <<Prev and Nex>> link while viewing a screen image is a big time-saver
>     for people viewing a gallery.

Good idea too.

> These are just a few of my ideas.  Let me know what you think.

Sounds great! Patches would of course be even better. ;)

-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chuck at horde.org>
Born right the first time.