November 03, 2006
Stringle Tabs
Driving home earlier this week, I wondered how useful it would be if Stringle - the string'n'glue learning environment - could support multiple tabbed panels. The problem of where to put the search box - and display the much larger search results page - was also bugging me.
The structure at the moment already separates out navigation (a Grazr widget), itinerant functionality (third party widgets, in the demo case provided via Widgetbox) and a web browsing area.
So just to try the look';n;feel'usability, here's a very rough cut - Stringle v2 that uses a tabbed area to provide two main display areas - one ('Web') for viewing any old web page (this is the panel that the navigation widget opens content into) and one ('Tools') that applications are loaded into.
Providing two tabs also made me realise that the only way of loading a page into the web content area was via the navigation panel. This seems a bit limiting, so I have added a URL address box so that you can open any page in that central area (which works unless the page being loaded insists on being at the top window level and not embedded in a frame):
At the moment I have hardcoded topbar navigation links in to a search tool (searchfeedr), a chat tool (Geesee), a word processor/spreadsheet app (Google docs - though there is an issue that actual docs are opened into a new window...) and a drawing tool (gliffy.
Clicking on an application link in the topbar navigation area opens the application in the Tools panel:
If I get a chance, I'll try and tweak this so that a delicious feed can be used to pull in the topbar navigation links.
The styling is also a real mess, but tweaking stylesheets still takes me far longer that it should, so you'll just have to put up with the mess, I'm afraid...
Posted by ajh59 at November 3, 2006 02:52 PM