November 1, 2017 at 04:02Widget Ideas for Easy Web Surfing
In the 27 years since the first web browser was created, the World Wide Web managed to change several times. Standards changed, whole classes of services appeared and went into oblivion. Users have also changed. Following the scientists and the military, geeks populated the network. To their great indignation, a schoolboy burst into a noisy crowd. Traders drove colorful carts with crampons and music. They hung up the marble tablets of the corporation. Behind them, housewives minced and hobbled up peppy retirees. Here then all of them were overtaken by the clatter of hooves of politicians of all stripes. And in the browsers themselves, tabs appeared during this time. Very handy thing. I don’t know how to use all this splendor without them at all.
Tabs are all that we have, because the back button, the magazine and bookmarks have not been working for a long time. After one hour of active surfing, the magazine looks so frightening that it forever discourages looking there. Bookmarks are required for this from a week, if you just save everything to your favorites, up to several years, if you create a thought-out folder structure in advance and always try to follow it. The irony is that when something becomes necessary, even if you remember the bookmark, it’s easier to find the site again in the search engine than to develop trash deposits. Well, with the "Back" button, the difficulties began even when the first dynamic pages appeared, and AJAX finally made it useless.
Of course, we have a search, and tags, and taxonomies, and recommendation services, and feeds on social networks. However, all these tools are tied to specific services, and I would like to have something right at hand, regardless of the site you visit.
Summarizing my own user habits, I tried to imagine tools that would make it easier for me to use the browser.
The widget is based on a script for viewing videos on Youtube: enter a search query, open a list, select a suitable video, then watch the suggested similar videos. The main task of the widget is to simplify this scenario, get rid of the need to open several tabs and use the "back" button to work with the results of the initial search and view all the objects of interest offered on the opened pages.
Procrastination is the godmother of the user segment of the Internet, from news, jokes and searching for critical household goods on Ali Express, to an article on the Congo constitution on Wikipedia or 10 useless facts about pairing weevils.
We simply must erect in her honor, if not a temple, then at least a pagoda.
The widget is designed for endless surfing on objects of the same type: pictures, videos, products. It is also suitable for a deep search, when there is little quality information on a topic of interest and it is necessary to sort through the mountains of informational garbage in order to select worthy resources.
At the top of the widget, which serves as the roof of our pagoda, is the initial information request or filtering parameters.
Below are two rows of thumbnails with selected resources.
At the bottom is a wide viewing area of the selected resource.
If you click on any thumbnail, the resource opens in the viewing area. Viewed thumbnails are graphically highlighted. If it was a miniature from the top row, the row moves down, replacing the bottom row, and the search query forms a new row of objects. If we clicked on the bottom row - everything remains in its place. This is necessary so that the user can view all the objects that interest him, without using the tabs or the back button.
Under the main area can be the history of viewed objects, in the form of a line of thumbnails.
In addition to a direct search query, a family of additional queries can be used to select resources, each of which has its own weight. The proportion of resources that fall into the output from this algorithm depends on the weight of the algorithm. The weight itself may vary, depending on what resources the user chose to view. As additional requests, requests of similar objects to previously selected resources are used by the user and an algorithm trying to summarize the topics of the totality of the selected resources and form a new request on their basis.
To enhance the learning of algorithms, the “useful / useless” buttons can be used. They also form additional labels for filtering browsing history.
Tired of procrastination in free flight, sometimes I want to head in the opposite direction, to examine in chronological sequence the deposits of the public left by generations of moderators.
A normal page with vertical scrolling for this would be enough if it weren’t for two problems: growing brakes as AJAX loads new elements at the bottom of the page and the difficulty of taking something useless from the opening treasures to your colleague who is working for both of you at that moment .
Therefore, this widget will not visually differ from the regular public page with posts in chronological order, but technically, objects will be loaded into the widget one at a time and deleted from memory as you scroll. In addition, evaluation, saving and sending tools that are built into our browser and do not depend on the mercy of the platform or social network on which the public is created will be very useful to us.
A widget can receive content by parsing existing publics on standard engines and platforms. However, if one of the major players takes up the implementation of the widget, he can receive data from social networks and directly, through the API, or create a new one.
It is unlikely that the ancient philosopher suggested how much his concept of metaphysical unity of command would be useful to us for comparing the prices of gadgets, air travel or searching for a source of fake news.
In the center of the widget is the display area of the object of interest to us. Around it are miniatures of selected alternatives, for example, the same product in other online stores. As an option, additional thumbnails can be formed loaded in incognito mode.
When you hover over one of the thumbnails, it expands to the size of the main area, and when you move the mouse pointer beyond it, it returns to its place. The user can remove uninteresting thumbnails from the widget (by clicking on the “cross” icon, dragging by the widget area or using the “reset” button) and they are replaced with a new set.
Having found a more suitable option, the user can shift the focus to it, then the widget will pick up alternatives to it, taking into account previously viewed and rejected resources.
For added convenience, you can extract key parameters from the page, for example, the price or date of publication of the news, and place them in the form of a sticker in miniature.
When thinking about saving something in bookmarks, many users begin to ache their wrists and twitch their eyes: even simply adding a resource to your favorites requires dragging the mouse away from the work area and getting into the “asterisk”. And saving to the desired directory implies a rather large number of precise movements and clicks, where any error will force you to start all over again at best, and in the worst case, you will have to switch to bookmark editing mode and fish out the link from the wrong category. And for editing categories you also have to use the keyboard.
Glancing at the archive created by such works, we will be disappointed to find how strange, sometimes, the resources are titled and how difficult it is to find the desired page from these headings "I remember, there were still such frames on a green background."
I would just like to take and drag the thumbnail of the page onto the “bookshelf”. To save space, thumbnails can be deployed deep into the screen, like jackets hung on a bar in a closet. This is enough to visually recognize the page. The name and other parameters can be displayed on hover.
In normal mode, the bar is displayed without additional elements.
When the boom is in focus, sorting options can be displayed above it. The user can change their priority by dragging and dropping.
Under the bar, you can display a time filter bar and a tag cloud. A single click on a tag turns tags off and on. Resources marked with only disabled tags do not fall into the selection. Double click on a tag, on the contrary, leaves only objects marked with this tag in the selection. To add a tag to a page, just drag its thumbnail onto the tag or vice versa. In addition to the dependence of the size of the tag in the cloud on the frequency of its use, the color of the tag may depend on the time elapsed since the last use of the tag: as soon as we mark the object with a new tag, the tag turns blue and gradually “cools” to the brown spectrum.
Sometimes a thumbnail is just a thumbnail.
Web links are a great invention. But in the GUI, we need more. We will save a screenshot of the page, its text content for local search, meta-information and the history of accessing the object to the object. Now Seagate will not be left without work.
The received objects can not only be saved in history, but also sent by e-mail or in instant messengers in order to get rid of the dialogues once and for all: “What is it? “Yes, open it already - the coolest virus is just for your version of the browser!” And the developers of privacy protection utilities will have something to include in the list of features.
For compatibility with instant messengers, you can create a cloud service that forms a short link to the transmitted object. If the user does not have a browser that can work with the meta-information of the object, the service displays a screenshot and a link to the user.
Enough is enough. If you develop or meet something like this, be sure to send the link in PM.
Tabs are all that we have, because the back button, the magazine and bookmarks have not been working for a long time. After one hour of active surfing, the magazine looks so frightening that it forever discourages looking there. Bookmarks are required for this from a week, if you just save everything to your favorites, up to several years, if you create a thought-out folder structure in advance and always try to follow it. The irony is that when something becomes necessary, even if you remember the bookmark, it’s easier to find the site again in the search engine than to develop trash deposits. Well, with the "Back" button, the difficulties began even when the first dynamic pages appeared, and AJAX finally made it useless.
Of course, we have a search, and tags, and taxonomies, and recommendation services, and feeds on social networks. However, all these tools are tied to specific services, and I would like to have something right at hand, regardless of the site you visit.
Summarizing my own user habits, I tried to imagine tools that would make it easier for me to use the browser.
Procrastination Pagoda
The widget is based on a script for viewing videos on Youtube: enter a search query, open a list, select a suitable video, then watch the suggested similar videos. The main task of the widget is to simplify this scenario, get rid of the need to open several tabs and use the "back" button to work with the results of the initial search and view all the objects of interest offered on the opened pages.
Procrastination is the godmother of the user segment of the Internet, from news, jokes and searching for critical household goods on Ali Express, to an article on the Congo constitution on Wikipedia or 10 useless facts about pairing weevils.
We simply must erect in her honor, if not a temple, then at least a pagoda.
The widget is designed for endless surfing on objects of the same type: pictures, videos, products. It is also suitable for a deep search, when there is little quality information on a topic of interest and it is necessary to sort through the mountains of informational garbage in order to select worthy resources.
At the top of the widget, which serves as the roof of our pagoda, is the initial information request or filtering parameters.
Below are two rows of thumbnails with selected resources.
At the bottom is a wide viewing area of the selected resource.
If you click on any thumbnail, the resource opens in the viewing area. Viewed thumbnails are graphically highlighted. If it was a miniature from the top row, the row moves down, replacing the bottom row, and the search query forms a new row of objects. If we clicked on the bottom row - everything remains in its place. This is necessary so that the user can view all the objects that interest him, without using the tabs or the back button.
Under the main area can be the history of viewed objects, in the form of a line of thumbnails.
In addition to a direct search query, a family of additional queries can be used to select resources, each of which has its own weight. The proportion of resources that fall into the output from this algorithm depends on the weight of the algorithm. The weight itself may vary, depending on what resources the user chose to view. As additional requests, requests of similar objects to previously selected resources are used by the user and an algorithm trying to summarize the topics of the totality of the selected resources and form a new request on their basis.
To enhance the learning of algorithms, the “useful / useless” buttons can be used. They also form additional labels for filtering browsing history.
Dante's staircase
Tired of procrastination in free flight, sometimes I want to head in the opposite direction, to examine in chronological sequence the deposits of the public left by generations of moderators.
A normal page with vertical scrolling for this would be enough if it weren’t for two problems: growing brakes as AJAX loads new elements at the bottom of the page and the difficulty of taking something useless from the opening treasures to your colleague who is working for both of you at that moment .
Therefore, this widget will not visually differ from the regular public page with posts in chronological order, but technically, objects will be loaded into the widget one at a time and deleted from memory as you scroll. In addition, evaluation, saving and sending tools that are built into our browser and do not depend on the mercy of the platform or social network on which the public is created will be very useful to us.
A widget can receive content by parsing existing publics on standard engines and platforms. However, if one of the major players takes up the implementation of the widget, he can receive data from social networks and directly, through the API, or create a new one.
Kaleidoscope of Aristotle
It is unlikely that the ancient philosopher suggested how much his concept of metaphysical unity of command would be useful to us for comparing the prices of gadgets, air travel or searching for a source of fake news.
In the center of the widget is the display area of the object of interest to us. Around it are miniatures of selected alternatives, for example, the same product in other online stores. As an option, additional thumbnails can be formed loaded in incognito mode.
When you hover over one of the thumbnails, it expands to the size of the main area, and when you move the mouse pointer beyond it, it returns to its place. The user can remove uninteresting thumbnails from the widget (by clicking on the “cross” icon, dragging by the widget area or using the “reset” button) and they are replaced with a new set.
Having found a more suitable option, the user can shift the focus to it, then the widget will pick up alternatives to it, taking into account previously viewed and rejected resources.
For added convenience, you can extract key parameters from the page, for example, the price or date of publication of the news, and place them in the form of a sticker in miniature.
Kodda Rod
When thinking about saving something in bookmarks, many users begin to ache their wrists and twitch their eyes: even simply adding a resource to your favorites requires dragging the mouse away from the work area and getting into the “asterisk”. And saving to the desired directory implies a rather large number of precise movements and clicks, where any error will force you to start all over again at best, and in the worst case, you will have to switch to bookmark editing mode and fish out the link from the wrong category. And for editing categories you also have to use the keyboard.
Glancing at the archive created by such works, we will be disappointed to find how strange, sometimes, the resources are titled and how difficult it is to find the desired page from these headings "I remember, there were still such frames on a green background."
I would just like to take and drag the thumbnail of the page onto the “bookshelf”. To save space, thumbnails can be deployed deep into the screen, like jackets hung on a bar in a closet. This is enough to visually recognize the page. The name and other parameters can be displayed on hover.
In normal mode, the bar is displayed without additional elements.
When the boom is in focus, sorting options can be displayed above it. The user can change their priority by dragging and dropping.
Under the bar, you can display a time filter bar and a tag cloud. A single click on a tag turns tags off and on. Resources marked with only disabled tags do not fall into the selection. Double click on a tag, on the contrary, leaves only objects marked with this tag in the selection. To add a tag to a page, just drag its thumbnail onto the tag or vice versa. In addition to the dependence of the size of the tag in the cloud on the frequency of its use, the color of the tag may depend on the time elapsed since the last use of the tag: as soon as we mark the object with a new tag, the tag turns blue and gradually “cools” to the brown spectrum.
Page Thumbnail
Sometimes a thumbnail is just a thumbnail.
Web links are a great invention. But in the GUI, we need more. We will save a screenshot of the page, its text content for local search, meta-information and the history of accessing the object to the object. Now Seagate will not be left without work.
The received objects can not only be saved in history, but also sent by e-mail or in instant messengers in order to get rid of the dialogues once and for all: “What is it? “Yes, open it already - the coolest virus is just for your version of the browser!” And the developers of privacy protection utilities will have something to include in the list of features.
For compatibility with instant messengers, you can create a cloud service that forms a short link to the transmitted object. If the user does not have a browser that can work with the meta-information of the object, the service displays a screenshot and a link to the user.
Enough is enough. If you develop or meet something like this, be sure to send the link in PM.