WMF UX Improvement Effort/01-02-2011 01-01-06-2011

Retrospectives

 * Need a better build system. We spent way too much time trying to build the application on Windows, Ubuntu, OSX (pending) rather then developing it

Search in text improvement
There is also a small bug: If the search term is not found, it returns an error saying "[JavaScript Application] The text you entered was not found." The "[JavaScript Application]" part should probably be removed or replaced. Ryan

Google-styled search result page
As previously discussed, Google-style search results would be a nice alternative to the current Sidebar implementation, especially if it could include a brief snippet from each article. Perhaps you could configure what type of search you prefer from a preferences menu. Ryan

Localization improvement
We will migration to translatewiki.net. We know how to make the migration, I still need to work on the migraation scripts, new templates and import scripts. Kelson 13:02, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Desktop File browser integration
Gnome done, OSX, KDE and Windows still to do. Kelson 14:12, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Large search button should launch search in page
It is not clear what the function of the large search button in the toolbar is. Usually that icon is associated with launching a "Search in page" feature. If someone assumes that that is its function, they will be confused when they click on it and nothing happens. Ideally the search box itself should have a small magnifying glass within the search box, like Firefox, Explorer, and Wikipedia, and the large search icon should launch the search in page dialog.

Preferences dialog box
Some settings ideas


 * Font selection and size
 * IMO this is the job of the ZIM publisher to provide such feature: he is responsible that the content is well displayed. This should/could be done using javascript/css/webfont/cookies pretty easily. I guess around 10 hours of work to introduce that option in my ZIM build process. The result would be a font selector on every page (for example on the top left corner) Kelson 12:16, 6 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Dont track history
 * Online/Offline mode if external links are present. Would make links disappear if your in offline mode
 * Default location for zim files