Drupal 7 - Creation of Content Disappeared - Problems of Point and Click

I have been exploring Drupal 7,  particularly in trying to control access to creation of content followed by moderation by the appropriate editor. Even though I may be convinced that the level of control sought is unnecessary; but since it should be doable, might as well make it available.

I added the Workbench Access and Workbench Moderation modules. After I had suitably configured everything along with LDAP authentication, I found that the content just could not be created. I repeated the process, without LDAP, and still the same result.

I created a new content type and it worked the way it was intended. I just could not figure out what was going wrong with existing content types.

In a moment of "inspiration", I decided to examine the Navigation menu. As the Workbench user interface includes a tab for creation of content, I had excluded the "Add content" and subsidiary content creation entries from the Navigation menu. The new content type I created had the entry in the sub-menu enabled. Since the parent "Add content" was not in the menu, the child entries were not visible.

I enabled the existing content types in the Navigation menu and the content could indeed be created by the correct users.

Finally - after going around in circles for over a day! In retrospect, that wasn't too bad.

Goofing up with Miro - could the UI be smarter?

I have been using Miro for several years. So, it isn't that I was unfamiliar with the user interface. However, I am still bewildered that how did I remove all the TED videos I had downloaded instead of deleting the one sentimental video I intended to delete.

A major part of the problem was the poor response of Miro on the netbook. I had clicked the delete option on the video as it was playing. It did not seem to have worked. I deleted it from the video list and clicked on a menu option to confirm deletion. I clicked on the form several times as it did not seem to respond. I clicked multiple times because on the netbook, I often needed to click twice for Miro to queue my download request.

Since nothing seemed to be happening, I suspect that I must have clicked on remove podcast option absentmindedly. I am hoping that I had clicked on a confirmation screen after I clicked on remove podcast. It would have been a very unfortunate programming issue if one of my earlier clicks had been taken as a confirmation for the deletion of the podcast!

This is, obviously, nothing more than a minor 'disaster' or, more precisely, an irritation. It does raise the issue of how does the software UI behave in a sluggish environment. Can we code UI in such a way that the intentions of the user and their interpretation is not distorted by performance issues of the application?

We also need a better alternative to the confirmation screen. I doubt if anyone reads the confirmation screen before clicking after the first few times. So, how about a confirmation screen after the event with an UNDO button instead of an OK?

LibreOffice Page Style - Not a bug, works as intended :(

I had used page styles several years ago in OpenOffice. I must have followed a tutorial because I do not remember having a miserable time of it.

Yesterday, I decided to rely on what seemed obvious. Since the obvious did not work, I thought that LibreOffice had  introduced a bug. This is what I thought was obviously buggy:

• Take a document with more than 3 pages. Insert a manual break (Ctrl+Enter) before the last page.
• First try: Go to the last page, use "Styles and Formatting", select Page Styles and apply Landscape style. ALL pages in the document now had Landscape style. Not what I intended.
• Second try: Go to last but one page. Choose Format -> Page option. Change the Next Style to Landscape. Now the first page remains Default but all the other pages are Landscape! Also, not what I intended.

Next, I searched for bugs on Page Style and then for tutorials on Page Style for OpenOffice.

The solution was simple. One has to use Insert -> Manual Break (and not Ctrl+Enter). This gives an option to specify the page style to be chosen for the next page. An explanation of how to use page styles for self-publishing may be seen here.

So far this is the only case where OpenOffice/LibreOffice GUI has left me thoroughly confused and very dissatisfied.

Unity – Great to be Different

Buying a computer – whether a pc or a notebook is really very boring. It is depressing that while we are overwhelmed by the variety of soft drinks or flavours of potato chips, there is very little choice in the marketplace in the way we interact with a computer. Of course, we can take the computer home and customise its interface to our heart's delight, but its not the same thing. It would be nice to have each vendor's computers show some distinctive character and give the salesperson a chance to talk about the differentiation. One can spend hours in the store or debating with friends as I find people doing about their smart phones. That is why I was very happy to hear the news that Ubuntu will have a non-standard interface for Gnome.
Some credit should go to Xandros for the custom interface layer they developed for EEPC701. It was just a thin layer on top of the icewm window manager but it made it very easy to use the, predominantly, KDE applications bundled with the netbook.
Developing a complete window manager is expensive but a layer to give it a unique character is well worth the branding effort.
As I implied, it does not matter whether Ubuntu's Unity interface is better. The fact that it is different makes it special. If we examine the way the major desktop managers, Gnome and KDE, are evolving, we can see that they are making it easy to support the desktops on different types of machines, including netbooks, tablets and mobile devices. In the process, they have to make it easy to create very different look and feel for a common underlying framework, widgets and applets.
KDE4.5 offers the workspace option. We can see the possibilities by comparing the desktop workspace with the netbook workspace. Soon, there will be a mobile workspace as well.
Gnome 3 is headed in the same direction. MeeGo 1.0 and Ubuntu Unity netbook 10.10 are both based on gnome. Both use the mutter window manager. It would be hard tell that by looking at them. The difference lies in a plugin for mutter and a few configuration files.
Sooner or later, some manufacturers will start to offer a custom OS. I can imagine manufacturers and desktop designers sitting and debating the character of their product, the audience they are targeting, the values they wish to promote. Introduction of the new designs can be regular events. We can have our own favourite designers. We may not have a 24x7 ftv but a couple of hours a week on the latest in UI designs seems inevitable!

Keyboad Interface - CTOS like options instead of short cut keys

I loved the Convergent's CTOS (Burroughs BTOS). The last time I used it was about 20 years ago - I would have been in my early 40's. As Ishiguro's novels show, memories are a very strange phenomena!

Still, I think a user interface modelled on CTOS on Linux would be very desirable for people who have problems with mouse - which includes a very large population - the aging group. Unfortunately, this is also the group which can't scratch its own itch :(

The features I think would be very useful:

1. Extensive use of function keys. Short cut keys do not need to be fixed. There is no need for each operation to be uniquely mapped to a key combination. Operations available could be mapped to the function keys based on the state of a document/application. This is quite similar to the options which are often available on right click of a mouse. A panel could dynamically display the function keys with labels of operations which were available.

2. Mark and Bound. The Mark key was used to set up a marker. Cursor could be moved around. When the desired destination was reached, Bound key was pressed and the content between Mark and Bound was selected. This becomes equivalent to a 'pick'. An operation like move, copy and delete can be done on that. Move and copy would expect that the cursor to be in the target position. This becomes equivalent to a 'drop'. Since a standard keyboard will not have a 'Mark' and 'Bound' key, function keys could be assigned to that role as described above.

I wish I could remember the number of times my father called in Goa regarding missing documents. He would press ctrl-A instead of shift-A and continue typing. By the time he would phone me, he had made closed and reopened the document and I could not help him over the phone.

He would have spent hours painstakingly typing a document and it would disappear. I never did figure out how to get rid of ctrl-A on Windows98.

Mouse - Click to Move

I had switched my parents to Fedora 4 years ago when I moved to Delhi area from Goa. One application from Windows98 remained - Freecell. My mother loved to play it and she just could not use drag and drop functionality. She has Parkinson's disease.

Then, after an update, I noticed 'Click to Move' option in AisleRiot. Had I missed it earlier or was it a new feature - I don't know. But after that, even Windows' freecell lost its place on the computer.

The reason I recalled this incident was that I was finding it extremely hard to use drag and drop on Kpat on the Lenovo netbook using the touch pad. Some operations with mouse can be very-very difficult as we age. KDE4.5 has more keyboard short cuts so I found that to play Kpat, I could use them. Not the best of solutions but a workable solution. An option for 'pick and drop' as an alternate to 'drag and drop' would have been very useful.

Sadly, keyboard shortcuts are just that. They are not very useful for older people who may have problem with mouse as well as remembering which key does what in which application.