Garo Garabedyan- a private blog

Have you sometimes started writing some long text, and suddenly the computer pop-ups window explaining something. You continue typing because you don’t look at the screen but on the keyboard. So going this way of entering text nowhere you press space or enter and then the default button of the pop-upped window is activated and the window disappears. At most of the time you can’t understand what happened.

Is it proper the operating system to warn you when you are typing nowhere? It is technologically possible, it only have to find that receives symbols which are not captures by any running program. This way it can warn you and possibly prevent you to not press enter/ space and choose the default option of something pop-upped.

Some things to be done:

• when application (active at the moment) receives symbols (commands from the keyboard) which are not commands on which it can react, the application should pass this commands to the operating system
• operating system when receives commands from the keyboard first have to check are they commands on which it can react, and if not (and if there are running 2 or more than 2 GUI windows, which are not minimized by the user) to alarm the user

Operating systems capture the input of text and tries to focus the file/ folder which starts with the entered text (in Windows only the first character of the file/ folder name). When the entered text doesn’t refer to any file and the user continues typing text by pressing some character (and the wrong characters’ count become 2) then is proper to alarm the user.

Other possible idea is to not let windows to pop-up before you have finished typing (a time constant have to elapse before you get the new window pop-up) by minimizing the pop-upped windows and even when a new window pop-ups to have a second time constant keeping the window inactive (to not click with the mouse and this time to see the po-up window and your click to affect the pop-up).

Have you been reading or writing something important and while doing so to be interrupted by a pop-up message or flashing area on the screen informing you about a new message (in general: event) on a group chat where you are in (skype) and/or a new message in an IRC channel (mIRC and even other chat clients). When you are doing something important on your PC you should be sure that there will not appear any kind of interruption. And because you can’t lock the all kinds of events while you are working on your main task, and maybe it is important to be in touch about some very important events (i.e. private message from someone, this event is addressed just to you, not to a crowd). You should decide for every application (and any application should enable it to the user) that do you want to receive events by the general way, or just for a period of time to receive event though a quieter way.

Back to the example in Skype and mIRC. Imagine you are doing something important and on the same time the group chat with all your classmates/colleagues gets really active and every time when you close the chat window you see a pop-up about a new message and a new window is opened and starts flashing. Skype should provide you with the ability to ignore events from a list of group chats and/or even people (other useful feature is to deny any group chat and people and enable a list of group chats and/or people who are not obeying the last rule), now Skype software lets you to say that you are not reachable and ignore any event from the Skype network. If you use Skype for many purposes you have to be free to choose which events and from who are interesting to you at some time.

I find this useful in Skype, mIRC and the rest services which present events, especially in chat/ conversation ones.

Possible implementaions

• Adding a button “ignore <name> for a moment” which stops presenting events of any kind while it is not pressed again (the next time the button is named “stop ignoring <name>”).
• Addig a main button “ignore all event for a moment” which stops presenting events of any kind while it is not pressed again (the next time the button is named “stop ignoring all”). Adding a new button connected with the last one to every place where it is able to be received and then presented event which button is named “enable presenting events from here” and it makes the same as it is named. Of course when you press once ignore all and then a list of enabling buttons for a concrete sources the time when you press stop ignoring all the system should have an politic (shared with the user) about the enable this activated buttons about the next time when ignore all is activated.
• It is useful to capture the moment of time when a user is using the PC and is ignoring some events, without declaring its ignoring state to the application. This time the application should stop warning and present a quiet (small and not flashing) sign about the occurred new event(s).

Editing wiki content with Ajax is more easy and fast. Special JS code can make a big step in recognizing Document Revisions of a wiki article.

Have you got enough time to press “[Edit]” and go to the editing page of the wiki site and find (recognize) what you have just wanted to edit. Here I draw the steps that you take when you want to edit a wiki-like page:

• find something or some things that you want to edit. (information that you want to precise, fix it)
• find and press the edit button for the page (in general the edit button for the area of text which you want to edit)
• new page with editing area is loaded in the browser on the place (in general when you don’t open it in a new tab) of the already red text (at which you remember the formatting and placing of the text and the places you want to edit)
• try to find place(s) of text which you want to change. Notice that now the content seems extremely different- the previous formatting of the content is lost- it has been converted into a plain text; to the previous content are added many special symbols (its important to notice that an array of symbols is forming a special symbol, so special symbols are a heavy weight visualization content) and the size of the content is increased extremely.
• editing (its important in some way to be familiar with some special symbols)

I believe that there is a better, easier way and more user-friendly to provide editing of a wiki page. Using Ajax you can let the user to edit concrete part of text and do it dynamicly without reloading the page, even you can keep the formating of the text and to not convert it (the formating) into special symbols.

What is the scenario (use-case) in the users view in this better way:

• find something you want to edit
• mark it (no matter is it a paragraph, sentence or few words)
• press special combination of button(s) or press a special button
• the selected content is turned into a textarea and according to the type of the selected content to the user are present special editing tools for the concrete aim
• edit
• press “Save” (or maybe “Update” is a better name of this button) or “Cancel” in order to save the changes or to ignore them
• getting the previous view of the page (not needed reloading it, just refreshing the edited text, for efficiency you can skip the last step is the content wasn’t changed- if it was pressed skip button, you can skip to check for changes if the user has pressed “save” and ask the server for the content).

In point 4 of the last scenario I was talking about this: Many wiki pages content special areas for adding notations, editing/ automatic creating of contents of a page, picture, table, part of an other wiki page, notes, references.

When this areas of content (or areas containing this kind of content) are edited its useful to present to the user specific tools for the concrete area (to make this tools visible). Else you can just let the user with a minimum amount of editing tools and provide way of choosing viewing some extra tools.

The text area is supposed to not present in general the content by special symbols, but like the content should look like. The user can be provided with an additional button (or tab) in order to get a plain text and special symbols of the content- the source code of the concrete text.

Many times people browse wiki pages while they are finding information. When they see some small mistake or not complete truth, they really don’t have the time to go to the edit page and fix the problem. I think that it is supposed to be more easy for them to use this kind of editing and this way to keep wiki content in a high quality.

May be it is hard to keep the same pixel place of the text which has to be edited you can enable something like this:

• user marks text which he wants to edit
• user presses Ajax powered button (or in TiddlyWiki double-clicks on the tiddler (text post))
• text turns into a textarea but the marked characters are again marked (in order the user to find what he was just reading) (with or without the special formating symbols)
  • There are web based word processors using html (of course not the all amount of tags, but limited one) as content of documents. In example Google Docs, WordPress.Com

Document revisions
There is a big field in Information Technologies which tries to point the differences between many revisions of one text. With an intelligent Ajax application, a wiki editing can be separated into 3 /three/ operations: Add, Erase and Change content. This way it will be clear what is the user doing and on which particular piece from the document. Google Docs do the same thing- tracing the user actions and concluding in Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations and what are their intentions, but Wiki Ajax app can be better.

2 /two/ actions: Add content, Erase content can be recognized by a JS function which is called every time a change is made in the document. This way we can work not with paragraphs, sentences and words… just working with every symbol and knowing that it is possible after it (next change in time period) to be added another next to the previous added on (in the content). Or to recognize when a piece of text is erased and another symbol is added on its place or that there is no symbol added on the erased text.