11–20 of 25 posts
I'd like to just give a big shoutout to the DocumentCloud team and their huge contributions to the open source community. I've been using underscore, backbone.js, and jammit extensively over the past few months, and it's been a joy to work with, and also well documented enough for me to extend and customize. So, to the DocumentCloud team I say: a big THANK YOU!
On the document search page:
* Double-click to open isn't intuitive for me on a website. Had a few puzzled seconds wondering how to open a document.
* Middle-click to open is broken.
* If I try to do a drag selection starting over a thumbnail, it doesn't work.
* The browser right-click context menu isn't always suppressed, and completely obscures your custom menu. Maybe float it to the left of the cursor so both are visible?
* Seems like the thumbnail/list view switcher buttons are the wrong way round.
* If I select multiple documents then click download, nothing happens. Either grey out the option, or add zip downloading.
* Selecting 'view pages' when in thumbnail view breaks the layout.
* The 'Page x of x' navigation at the bottom is non standard without being any more useful. Found it annoying having to actually type in the page I wanted to go to. Duplicating the pagination nav at the top of the page would be nice.
* Left-hand document list is well thought out, like that the scrollwheel works, but it still feels a bit awkward. Not sure why.
* 'Entities' seems too specific to describe what are essentially tags. Caused a bit of confusion. Phone numbers and 'terms' are not entities.
* The 'Log In' button is a bit out of context next to the other buttons. Maybe move it to the top right next to your logo?
* As the document links are taking me off-site, I'd like the statusbar url to still appear on hover.
* Found myself focusing the search box just so the text was dark enough to read.
Document viewer:
* The document sidebar might be better on the left. Having it on the right breaks Fitt's law for the scrollbar.
* Arrow key and spacebar scrolling doesn't work on document load. You have to click to focus the document first.
* The document page navigation might be better in the top bar, rather than the sidebar. Having it in the sidebar gave me the false expectation of sidebar content that changed related to the page I was on.
* The 'Pages' thumbnail view only seems to show up for some documents.
* The zoom level I set for the 'Pages' view also changes the zoom level for the 'Document' view. So I can't easily browse with tiny thumbnails but fullsize documents.
* Annotation UI is great, very intuitive. The restrained use of colour on the rest of the site really pays off, that yellow is hard to miss.
* With two notes parallel to each other cause their markers to overlap, example:
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/29627-cosa-letter-on-...
* From the 'notes' view I should be able to click on the passage in the note to get back to its original document context.
I'm a huge fan of backbone.js and underscore.js. Fantastic work.
One minor suggestion. Make it easier to get to documentcloud.org/public from documentcloud.org ... the marketing copy on the home page is a bit distracting and it's WAY more compelling to just see the documents. I'm a huge fan of backbone.js and underscore.js. Fantastic work.
Very impressive and ambitious UI, lots of great attention to detail. Click-and-drag selection highlighting in particular. Here's some observations about the interface whilst I was exploring. This is Chrome/Ubuntu. On the document search page: * Double-click to open isn't intuitive for me on a website. Had a few puzzled seconds wondering how to open a document. * Middle-click to open is broken. * If I try to do a drag…
I agree with nathan82 about being puzzled for a few seconds on how to open a document.
Any chance you guys have plans, or even an idea, to extend a similar app to public record custodians? If so.. I'll have to watch out. :)
It looks great. I agree with nathan82 about being puzzled for a few seconds on how to open a document. Any chance you guys have plans, or even an idea, to extend a similar app to public record custodians? If so.. I'll have to watch out. :)
As to opening it up for public record custodians ... we don't want DocumentCloud to become a general dumping ground for every government document under the sun -- sticking to newsworthy documents has worked well so far. But at the same time, it's silly to refuse a document that the government wants to publish, and then turn around and accept that same document from a reporter the next day. I think there's a fine line to walk there, while keeping the content of the catalog relevant and searchable, and we'll have to try and find it.
For the record, our policy for contributors is currently "anyone who reports on primary source documents" ... which includes newsrooms like the Washington Post as well as individual bloggers like SCOTXBlog.com.
Very impressive and ambitious UI, lots of great attention to detail. Click-and-drag selection highlighting in particular. Here's some observations about the interface whilst I was exploring. This is Chrome/Ubuntu. On the document search page: * Double-click to open isn't intuitive for me on a website. Had a few puzzled seconds wondering how to open a document. * Middle-click to open is broken. * If I try to do a drag…
Thanks for all the notes -- this is incredibly helpful. I clearly won't be able to address all of these today ... but I'm definitely printing this list out and taping it on the wall.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for all the notes -- this is incredibly helpful. I clearly won't be able to address all of these today ... but I'm definitely printing this list out and taping it on the wall.
No problem, I've got plenty more- modal dialogs have green close buttons! 'Sort by' button doesn't show current sort type without clicking, etc etc. DocumentCloud looks like a fantastic project, I'd love to help out if you need it.
If you're a web developer, backbone.js will teach you how to make gui apps! I've been working with MVC style frameworks for quite a while on the server-side but until backbone I've never been able to get my head around how to create a gui app using MVC. It was never clear where and how to put things and before I knew it, everything would go spaghetti on me. I've done lots of js and lots of js intensive apps and I alw…