One of the problems I’ve seen consistently with Operator is that people don’t realize there are other ways to interact with it besides the toolbar. To solve that problem, I’m creating a first run page for Operator that shows the various interaction methods. Here’s what it is going to look like:
It will be dynamic – that is as you make changes in the dialog, they will happen live in the browser.
What do you think? Is this enough?
Screenshots of widgets are often mistaken for real widgets, so I’m personally hesitant to use them.
Considering that it’s changing the browser dynamically it might not be necessary to show example widgets.
However if it’s necessary I would suggest a slightly different way of expressing this. Perhaps as a fieldset with a title of ‘Notications will be shown in your browser here’ containing a screenshot of a single window that has parts removed and revealed.
I’d love to see some kind of small visual indication (ie, a CSS style or double underlines or something) you can switch on, and rely on the right click context menu.
That lets me know there’s information and provides me (direct) actions with it. I wouldn’t for instance go through a menu item or toolbar to copy an image to my clipboard.
Mike, that’d be awesome. I’m one of the Operator users who had no idea how to interact with semantic data outside of the Operator toolbar. I’d also be interested to know the best way to add or update the actions I can use on particular data types.
Daniel:
I kind of provide that. You can select “Highlight Microformats” in options.
The reason that it doesn’t really work very well, though is very obvious on a site like upcoming.org. The microformats are just about the entire page.
So it’s difficult to convey to the user which part of the page actually represents the microformat.
I have always just used a subset, and think this dialog is great to select which ones one likes!
Good idea – but I suggest that you add a note to the effect that “You can change these settings at any time, using the ‘Options’ dialogue”.