So, Hyperwords works well on text on the web, but it’s annoying on text when you are editing, it pops up when you want to select text for deletion etc.

 

But first, where we are coming from. We don’t have a lot of money or other resources. If we had solid funding, we’d go about this quite differently. This is not an excuse, but it’s important to understand that we do not have the same goals as someone designing a whole system from scratch, rather, we have to prove the usefulness to the Firefox users, then grow it from there. Yes, a system wide implementation would be nice.

 

Similarly, the ‘conceptual purity’ of the original vision, of “do this with this” is proving to be less than ideal. It was intended to give us richer interaction when interacting with interactive text. But sometimes a ‘hello’ or a ‘please’ in human language is enough. So we try to make phrases short when that is useful.

 

But the main point of this post is how to deal with Hyperwords when authoring.

 

An overview of possible methods

 

One, don’t do anything, make Hyperwords a readers tool, not an authors (nah).

 

Two, make the menu pop up like it does with the default surfing behavior (messy, interferes with selecting to delete and so on). It’ll be an option on 1.2.1

 

Three, give it key command-access. Yes, this is the way to go. So we test. Few keyboard commands are left that work on both Mac and WinThing. We’ll keep playing.

 

Four, we add a little triangle, pop-up to selections. I like this a whole lot. A bit like a mini-me (miraculous extension). But is likely hard to code.  

 

Five, a command toolbar. At the bottom right of the screen. User clicks on the toolbar, menu options come up (exactly the same as the Hyperwords menu today). If they have any text selected, the command chosen is executed on that text. If nothing is selected but the command needs text, a text entry box comes up once they choose a command.

 

So this is what we will do now, build a toolbar, and experiment with how is feels to use. Then we’ll see about the little triangle.