Another update to the Ensemble UI Mockup

First of all, thanks for the great feedback on my mock-up from last week.

I’ve updated my mock-up again. Here are the highlights:

  • The contact tag selector has been decoupled from the search input, and is now on its own
  • Added widgets for sorting the contact list (currently only decorative)
  • Search queries can be cleared by clicking “X” on the search input
  • Support for semi-hierarchical tags
  • The contact list has been made wider
  • Moved the add / remove contact buttons

I’ve also updated the feedback form. Please give me feedback on this design. Once again, just to reiterate, at this point I’m primarily interested in how the mock-up lists contacts, and allows you to display that list. The view for individual contact details is of less interest to me right now.

Anyhow, check out the new mock-up here.

Usual disclaimer: The code is ugly as hell, and I haven’t tested outside of Firefox.

Note: Each tag should have some contacts. If you’re seeing empty tags (No search results for “”), try the following:

  1. Go here, and click refresh
  2. Then go here, and click refresh
  3. Then go here, hold down shift, and click refresh.

Don’t ask me why this happens, or why the above works. I think people.mozilla.org is doing some caching, and sometimes doesn’t realize that I update my stuff. Or maybe I’m doing my rsync all wrong. I have no idea.

 

3 thoughts on “Another update to the Ensemble UI Mockup”

  1. Mook

    Since the new feedback form no longer has a free-form text entry field for misc comments:
    – The animation on opening/closing the tag list thing is jarring. (Having it overlap the contact list, rather than pushing it down, would be much better.)
    – Searching for “family” in the text box has no results; that was unexpected.
    – General question: if the whole thing is expected to be implemented in HTML, how will this affect extensions? Would this bit of the UI be unextensible? (Things I can think of off the topic of my head: additional contact data fields such as PGP key; hooks to, say, dial a contact via Skype or something; possibly ability to search via transliteration, such that “Yukiko” will find the first contact in the list.)

  2. Mike

    @Mook,

    The animation on opening/closing the tag list thing is jarring. (Having it overlap the contact list, rather than pushing it down, would be much better.)

    I disagree, since this would obscure contacts in the list, and since this would also likely cover the scrollbar, make it non-obvious how to view the obscured contacts. Floating things on top of scrollables is something I’d like to avoid if possible. 🙂

    – Searching for “family” in the text box has no results; that was unexpected.

    Noted.

    General question: if the whole thing is expected to be implemented in HTML, how will this affect extensions? Would this bit of the UI be unextensible? (Things I can think of off the topic of my head: additional contact data fields such as PGP key; hooks to, say, dial a contact via Skype or something; possibly ability to search via transliteration, such that “Yukiko” will find the first contact in the list.)

    Extensibility is something I want Ensemble to support, but I hope to do that with Javascript hook points rather than XUL overlays (much the same way that Jetpack extensions work).

    See a more detailed answer here.

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