Rethink the user experience

[baudren]

I think that the design and separation into three tabs is not so good, in standard usage. I will describe the typical use cases (for me, please feel free to add your own, so that we make this post complete and can think about solutions from there)

• Open the program, find an existing notebook, open the preview, filter to see if what I search is already mentionned. If not, go back to editor, create an entry, save it, recompute the preview.
• Open the program, create a new notebook, create an entry, preview it.
• Open the program, preview a notebook, find a typo, go back to editor, edit it away, preview it.

In the first two cases, I do not use the editor panel for another reason than the functionnality create a new entry. And it cost me some clicks to get there.

I think that we could safely get rid completely of the editor tab, and procure a new entry button both in the library (then you choose a notebook), and in the preview mode.

There should still be a way to open in an external editor (from the preview (toolbar), or from the library (right click)).

To correct typos, we could imagine that making a right click on the preview panel could open a menu with a quick edit, that would open an editor at the cursor position. There is also always the possibility to fix the typo from the external editor.

[baudren]

Good read about the Google material design:

http://www.google.ch/design/spec/layout/structure.html#structure-ui-regions

I think that for a desktop version, we could limit the application to be:

UI zone	Functionalities
toolbar	new post, export to html, change source folder, search
side-nav	file navigation/folder creation
main	html display of notes (as cards? or continuous webpage?)
right-nav	tag filtering (column, cloud? Options to show all tags, some more interaction with tags) and date filtering

We could also browse their templates to see more in details what they propose for desktop applications.

[egolus]

thanks for sharing this.

for the main zone: I like the idea of cards for the notes. This helps when you want to select and move them (as discussed on gitter)