2 May

UI Concept: Snippet Editor

May 2nd, 2007 — 10:36 pm — Dave

Definite slate article overload today :) Spent the evening hacking away (only a little bit) on a new concept for our snippet editor. I don’t think we’ve ever been happy with the implementation. If I remember correctly it was a quick hack with the idea that at some point I’d pick it up and clean it all up. Yeah, that plan worked out real well. Well, now I’m getting to it… about 8 months behind schedule. And, yes, we’re never happy seemingly.

So the inspiration for this little hack is Mac OS X. I really like the window-based modal dialogs so that’s what I’ve been searching for. I finally found something sort of close to what I wanted in ModalBox. Dropped into the JS and I was able to get the window to appear like it’s part of the textarea instead of the page. Now, it’s far from perfect but the whole idea is just to see the interface.

Check out the demo . AFAIK, it’s FF2 only. The image in the middle is from Google Pages which I’ll be using as “inspiration” for the final implementation. I love stealing… I mean, finding inspiration. What do you think?

3 comments — Reply to article
#1: Chris said on May 2 at 10:47 pm

I like this sliding in from the textarea – it definitely works. It would be nice if the snippet button could toggle the modal box – right now if you click it after the box is open, it does some funky stuff ;-p

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#2: Dave said on May 2 at 10:53 pm

What are you talking about? The “dancing modal box” is a feature. Sheesh.

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#3: Ryan said on May 3 at 12:40 am

I like it – it feels clean and really easy to use.

“How many clicks does it take to get the dancing modal box to leave the screen?” (hint: 32)

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