Double Click - open browser. And more

[Ed Kleban]

On 12/23/05 5:12 PM, "Ed Kleban" <Ed at kleban.com> wrote:
> On 12/23/05 4:46 PM, "Ruslan Zasukhin" <sunshine at public.kherson.ua> wrote:
>> On 12/24/05 12:28 AM, "Ed Kleban" <Ed at Kleban.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I'll send you a new email on that when I get around to writing it up as a
>>> proposal.  But you raise an interesting point there.  If you do this
>>> correctly, you should be able to backwards as well as forwards.  OR it could
>>> be that the desire to do that is simply a non sequitir and in fact is just a
>>> general case of "going forward in a different direction" in terms of the
>>> interface.  -- which should be a very confusing statement that you don't
>>> understand, because I don't I understand it yet either.
>>> 
>>> But consider:
>>> 
>>> If you have a whole bunch of tables, each of which has more than one
>>> relationship with other tables, then how do you define forward and backward?
>> 
>> As backward I did mean:
>> 
>>     you jump fr r1 to 2r then to r3 then to r4.
>> 
>> So you see this path
>> 
>>     r1 r2 r3 r4
>> 
>> Now you can click r2 to return back into that point.
>> 
>> I did not mean SEARHC backward.
>> 
> 
> Yeah, so we're talking about a traversing backward through the navigation
> history.  That's cool.
> 
> But there IS another concept which does make sense for some special tables
> when viewed by specific browsers that can exploit some specific viewing
> paradigms.  And if there is merit in doing so, it's worth exploring what
> those mean, whether they offer something of value to the user, and if a
> clever browser can provided an interface that is simple enough to make this
> easy to use.
> 
> And I think the answer is yes.  But it's a new concept we have not discussed
> yet.
> 
> But we will....  :-)
> 
> --Ed
>  

I was cleaning out my email box and see I never responded to this.   Now
that I've got a bit of breathing space, let me offer the proposal that comes
to mind for this.

The current VS DataBrowser window Essentially has two pane.  The top one has
the table of interest -- perhaps because you double-clicked on the table
name in the Schema Browser -- and the lower pane shows the corresponding
table for a given selected row in the top table.  We've previously discussed
how it would be nice to navigate through a chain of related fields across
multiple windows; perhaps by double-clicking in a row in the lower table to
open yet a third window displaying that table at the top, and allowing the
bottom of the third pane to show a related row of some other related
table... and so forth opening a new window for each link traversed.

I'd like to propose that there's possibly a more useful presentation scheme
to consider.  That scheme would look a lot more like the way "programming"
is done in a stacked series of visual code blocks in QuicKeys and now in
Apple's new Automator tool.  Instead of coding blocks, you'd have table
snippets.  Thus you could keep stacking more and more panes or table blocks
in the window, and scroll among them.  If you wanted to see a few more rows
in a given table you could make that block a bit taller by moving a window
splitter.  But it would be a window splitter in a tall, virtually infinite,
scrollable window.   You could also scroll a table within the table block,
just as you can now within the upper or lower pane.

The result would be that you could navigate as far as you like, forward,
backward, in loops if you wanted to through the table relations until you
tracked down what it was you wanted to see.

Now here's the interesting part.  Stacking more and more blocks at the
bottom of this infinitely scrollable window allows you to navigate "forward"
down whatever path you should decide to wander, and then to either review
your path by scrolling up, or indeed back up along the path by deleting
table blocks you have visited.  HOWEVER... what's to prevent you from
starting at the top of the window and choosing to explore a "backward" path
by stacking new blocks at the head of the list allowing you navigate along a
completely different path?  The only thing I can think of preventing this is
fear that you'd possibly be doing something non-intuitive that nobody else
has ever provided in an interface before.  But Valentina can be the first!

You could of course at any time always open up yet another window.  But now
instead of having to open possibly a dozen windows to see a whole picture,
you might get by with just opening two or three that had 3 to five blocks
each.  This is a vertical equivalent of the horizontal tabbed interface that
browsers like Safari and RB 2005 now use.

That make any sense?

What ya' think?

--Ed