inline outliners

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel@lsi.usp.br>]

Here is an idea I had some time ago. I thought I had posted it
here already, but looking back though my old mail it seems
that I didn't. Sorry if I am wrong about this...

It really messes up the "single object identity story" in the
Kansas user interface to have both morphs and outliners for
the same object present on the screen at the same time.

I can feel a little better about this if I think about the outliner
as the morph for the mirror of the object - then we have two
morphs for two objects. I would prefer, however, to have the
outliner appear with the corresponding morph embedded in it
as its title. Instead of having the outliner say "aCircleMorph"
it would show the circle morph near its top. The outliner
would pop up in such a place that the circle morph would be
at the exact same spot it was before.

What if the morph has other morphs embeded in it? No problem -
the whole morph-tree would be the "title" for the outliner
and the user would have to understand that the outliner was
for the "lowest" morph of the bunch.

What if the morph is embeded in some other morph? This is
very tricky to solve, but I would "grow" the outliner under
the given morph but over its sibling and parent morphs. The
outliner would be pseudo-embeded in the morph's parent
visually, but shouldn't have any effect on layout. One
problem with this is that browsing more than a single
submorph would lead to a great visual clutter. If it is
easy to sprout and shrink outliners for these embeded
morphs, however, limiting oneself to looking into one
morph at a time won't be such a big bother.

-- 
-----=============( Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr )===========-----
http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/merlin.html | mailto:jecel@lsi.usp.br