Sam’s Greenstone Blog 27/4/2011

admin. Wednesday, April 27th, 2011.

Work continues to go well on Greenstone 3. The new skin is looking really good and  – apart from a few small design decisions that have yet to be made – it is nearing completion. Currently what we have done is linked together the table of contents and the document so that when you close up a section in the table of contents it is also closed in the document (and visa versa), allowing you to more easily find the information you want, as well as providing a better overview as to what the document contains and how large it is.

One design decision we are currently contemplating is what to do with sections that contain other sections AND text of their own. For example, imagine a book has a chapter called Dogs, which has a section called Jack Russell. Lets say that the Dogs chapter has some text at the start of it describing dogs in general before moving on to specific types. If someone wants to collapse the Dog chapter they can simply click the – next to the Dog chapter in the table of contents, or if they want to collapse the Jack Russell chapter they can simply click the – next to the Jack Russell section. Doing it this way however does not allow the user to collapse just the text at the start of the Dog chapter, so this text will be there regardless of which section in the Dogs chapter they want to focus on, which is not ideal, especially if it is a long description.

The example above and other such design decisions are what we are currently working on solving, so that the new skin can be as easy and intuitive as possible.

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