[Soc-coordination] amancay progress report, week 8

[Diego Escalante Urrelo]

Hey everyone,

so this past week has been really interesting, I sat down and changed my
approach to focus first on how I would like amancay to be regarding look
+functionality and parting from that develop the code to support such
stuff.
On the bright side of things, I finished university semester yesterday
so I'm now 100% free for soc work :-), previous weeks has been a mess.

First thing I did was to rebase the template over perfect-3-column
layout[0], my idea was to take the hand crafted 2-column look[1] of
amancay and turn it into a more fail proof one with the addition of
flexibility to change which side the column was and etc. However, right
now after some testing I'm thinking I should switch to a single column
layout with an ocassional contextual right column. I feel the space to
the left is being wasted.

Later on I gave some love to the bug report page[2] basically stealing
ideas from GNOME's bugzilla and Launchpad, I thought that the layout
should make it easy for people to focus on the real content and not ugly
tables like vanilla bugzilla. So titles are huge, dates are always in
"time since" format and I'm planning on adding icons to help recognize
bug severities easier, both to single and list view of bugs.

One thing that I wanted to try was tag drag and dropping, although in
the end it turned out to be a really lame idea for a tagging UI (not
really practical, steals too much space) I realized I could use this
tagging idea for doing stuff in some other pages, for example dragging a
bug from one package to another. In the end this little experiment gave
me some ideas and a good grip of MochiKit.

Still on the single bug topic, I'm looking forward to implementing some
kind of automatic collapse on redundant info, say for example "PGP
signed" lines or "System information", maybe even quoted lines. See for
example the current look of a cowsay bug[3], it is cluttered top and
bottom and makes the real content of the comment hard to grasp unless
you focus, I mean it's hard to 'visually eliminate' so much stuff. My
goal would be to have this parts made contextual info for comments, for
example take 'pgp signed' and make it a lock icon on the header of the
comment.

Finally, for the bug listing part I thought of trying something
different, almost mailreader like[4]. My rationale is that in a bug
report list you care about the number, the title and the report/mod
date. Author and severity doesn't count that much so I put those in a
different row that I'm wondering if I should collapse by default.
Like in the single bug report pages I switched dates to time since
dates. Also, and just a couple hours of work away now, I wanted to
implement starring like in gmail/google stuff, so you can star packages,
bugs, people and have their latest activity show in your homepage.

What I'm planning for this next week:
 - finish positioning the forms in single bug reports and convert others
like subscribe to 'actions' (say buttons)
 - implement starring of packages (amancay implements this but not as
starring, it's a matter of adapting it)
 - get a beta running for debconf (Arthur suggested me to get a debian
server instead of using mine, I'll ask Margarita and will fall back to
my own if it's hard to get one before Wednesday)

I'm missing some control@ functionality yet, but I have got a grip of
amancay code and feel confident it's not complicated to implement hence
I'm trying to focus on making the current functionality have a kick ass
UI so this new stuff will blend into an already great workflow.

I kindly ask all of you for any comment on the screenshots[5] of the new
layout, please let me know what you think either here or in a flickr
comment.

Btw, you can checkout[6] amancay and run it in your machine, at least to
check out the looks since actions are a bit broken now because of the
layout change.

Thanks!


0 - http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-3-column.htm
1 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/3735674223/
2 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/3736418936/
3 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/3736418538/
4 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/3736419288/
5 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/diegoe/tags/soc2009/
6 - svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/bts-webui/bts_webui

Appendix:

The lame git shortlog that says really little, all of it in SVN[6]
already:
        1d25d1e bug list: further visual changes
        efa8dc5 bug list: enhance layout a bit more
        249a867 search: remove useless orderedlist
        8a47aca bug list: sort bugs by package
        dd0e784 icons: add some stock icons
        066c395 search: remove a wrong 'not' breaking search
        a17de3b tags: new tag dragndrop UI alpha
        2d652b6 templates: use the new MochiKit version
        20917f9 bug_tags: clarify how the tag works
        d276d31 mochikit: update to v1.4.2
        d60c455 bug: enhance bug rendering page
        de1f500 tables: minor nitpicks
        6c8d953 templates: use 2 column layout
        2e1d6cc templates: use timesince in bug table
        654a35d template_filters: add tstodatetime filter