[Swift-devel] Tryswift enhancements

[Michael Wilde]

[Moving discussion to swift-devel]

On 4/15/14, 12:06 PM, David Kelly wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> One idea I had for tryswift was to change the way that file outputs 
> are displayed. Keeping them in a drop down list saves some space and I 
> think makes it look a little cleaner. To see what I mean, check out 
> http://swiftvm4.ci.uchicago.edu and try the foreach example (still 
> working on some CSS changes there as well).
>
> Right now it only handles html/text, but if the file output was images 
> or videos, they could be loaded in the same window. Just wanted to get 
> your initial thoughts before I did too much with it.
Hi David,

I think this is heading in a nice direction. It looks very nice and clean.

Some thoughts:

Top window:
- Add text in front of menu:   Example: [example-menu] [Explain]
- [Explain] button should pop out in a new window, sized and placed 
"nicely" (not quite sure what nicely involves yet ;)

Bottom window
- its hard to tell when the script completes or how many files it produced
- when you view a file it overwrites the progress window
- (reset is broken, btw)

How about:
- dont show the output-files menu while the script is running
- when script completes, show the menu with a label [N files produced:] 
[output-files-menu]
- when you select a file, show it in a new popup window "placed nicely" 
with a [close] button top and bottom
- allowing that window to be multi-media sounds nice

Bigger project:
- for status, show running tally of the status to the right of the 
control buttons
- add button [Progress log] that shows the progress to date or after the 
fact, as a pop-up. With cleaner timestamp etc. WHich we should make the 
default for all Swift runs.

So with this improved progress menu, you'd have a very clean look with 
the Swift text taking most of the window, bracketd by a script-selector 
stripe at the top and an execution control strip at the bottom.

How do these sound to you?

- Mike