Sunday, November 02, 2008

fresh eyes


It's funny, sometimes things are so much a part of the UI that you are accustomed to, that you just no longer even see them. As we brought Designer over to Eclipse, many pieces of UI moved over almost exactly as they were in the "old" Designer. But thanks (really!) to a customer who talked to me after a demo a little while ago, now every time I look at this very old piece of UI design, it drives me crazy. So not long after deciding to just "look around," I found myself actually changing some code - and those design doc properties, that have looked like that since before I started working on Notes, now (I hope) make a little more sense! The old way was designed for the space constraints of the infobox! And the most likely significant piece of information (the note ID) was last, and the UNID was spread over two lines.... I'm thinking this design is better, but I have a few questions.... (And to be clear, it's not even checked in yet, so surely won't be in 8.5, but rather in whatever number comes next!)

Does anyone even need to look at sequence time and number? Is this a better order? Do you really need to see the database replica id on every design element doc id panel? Does anyone really need the old way of presenting this in that form?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks much better. Are they selectable and can be copied with Ctrl+C? (That makes a lot of sense to test things). I think the replicaid is just fine here.
Now we need a similar display in the client :-)

Craig said...

Excellent! I hope they're copy-able (as Mr. Wissel noted).

I do (from time to time) need the sequence # & time. I actually use it more often to explain to 'newbies' how the Rep/Save conflict deal works.

It's great to have .you. working on this, because you understand the history, but it's really great that you are listening as well.
The hard part of having a product with the long (eternal? at least in PC software sense) history of Notes is that it's hard to know when to change what.

Michelle said...

To answer your specific question - No I don't think the db replica ID is necessary when showing the properties of every design note.

If this is available (and as mentioned *can be copied*) from a database properties screen then everyone I know will be very, very happy.

sean said...

looks much much better, this has been a frustration for years.

Can I add my weight to the comments on being able to copy the rep id - all of our recent applications have an action to do this which we obviously would rather not have

Anonymous said...

First, I'll assume that since every other rendition of the properties has been copyable, this will be also. Additionally, we just need a place to get to the database replica ID and the database properties section makes the most sense, so no it is not required on every design element, and yes, please keep the sequence time and number. I have needed them to explain history to management from time to time, not often, but I know where they are.

Anonymous said...

I see no need to repeat the database replicaid as it is not really an attribute of the document. What I would suggest is adding the Notes URL and the HTTP URL for the document so that it becomes easy to copy a link to the document for use with either the Notes or Web clients.

Maureen said...

thanks, everyone! Yes, you will be able to copy from them (you can even in 8.5, but the values have all the OF and ":" in them.

Very interesting thought to put the URLs in there - will see if I can add that :-)