I like the "block" abstraction. It seems like a good way to visually work with structured content. It also makes the editor really easy to customize (at least conceptually), which I find a big plus.
At least in the example, there did not seem to be a way to undo things. This is a bit annoying, especially because it forces a confirmation step when deleting things. I think most common use-cases would be much better served by being able to undo a delete than having to confirm it each time. Even if you don't want to have a general undo button, I would prefer a GMail-style undo link that only pops up after you've deleted something to the current behavior.
I agree with you. I prefer the concept of undoing because I personally don't like to be asked if I really want to perform each action I intended to do. It makes also the application feels faster because it require one step less.
: I like the "block" abstraction. It seems like a good way to visually work with structured content.
Hmm, IDK. I can see that it could be a good way to represent and manipulate the chunks of text once you've got them, but having to click a special icon and choose the block type every time you add a new paragraph (rather than just pressing "return" for the most common case of a new text paragraph) seems pretty clumsy.
I really like the blocks idea. Considering this will be used by content creators who are not necessarily code savvy, it seems like a great way to allow them to organise the structure of the document without giving them enough rope to hang themselves. In practise, most content will be text and they can just keep writing and hitting return. I can't imagine many documents will include a large number of other content types.
I currently work on a site that uses TinyMCE and inserting images, videos etc. is a nightmare. There's this combination of the burden of HTML sanitization and the illusion of total freedom that TinyMCE gives to content creators. Something with better separation of content types would be wonderful.
OneNote uses a less rigorously enforced version of the block abstraction. You don't have to work in blocks but it encourages you to. What makes it actually usable is using tables to create structure.
I used this block idea in a CMS I once wrote but basically none of our clients got it and therefore they didn't like it. In the end I rewrote it to the normal way.
This is interesting. Back in 2005 my company had built this exact same editor for our CMS product and customers hated it, too. Turns out, most people seem to prefer filling in forms. However, maybe the time is now right for a change.
Direct editing is becoming more common and therby acceptable I think.
> I like the "block" abstraction. It seems like a good way to visually work with structured content.
I've seen this idea in the real word, and it fails with editors. If you provide WYSIWYG, editors expect to format content just like one does in Word or InDesign, absolutely positioning elements, and the result to be identical (which is obviously a problem nowadays with elastic layouts and mobile sites).
On the example page there is no option to add images. So initially I thought that sir trevor couldn't do image blocks. You might get more interest if the Example page makes it clear some blocks are disabled.
I'm actually using it.. It's reall good if you can use it and it's stable..
Had a little problem with one of the dependencies though (removed a line from the source of underscore.js to get it to work, everything else just works fine)
That's him - Sir Trevor is a much loved British personality (ex-news anchor); he's enough of a fixture to have been parodied for many years by Lenny Henry (a British comedian) as Sir Trevor McDonought.
He's best known for being a good communicator, clear and concise, informative but never patronising. Which makes him quite a good 'patron' for a writing app.
Concrete5 has the block model for sure, but I believe the editor is standard TinyMCE. Sir Trevor seems to take this to the next level, with the ability to configure a block for context specific editing. This would be a nice enhancement to Concrete5, or perhaps a new add-on.
One improvement to Sir Tevor would be to provide drag-and-drop ordering, which Concrete5 has today.
It has it, it's just not as slick as it could be. In Sir Tev, you're moving a copy of the object, whereas moving the actual object would be cleaner, and more obvious. At the moment it looks more like when you accidentally grab an image and move it (for it to then snap back into place) in some browsers.
The use case I am thinking about is crowdsourcing typo corrections --- while reading some text you see a type, click click and you submit a typo-fix to the author. Such a tool would vastly improve the quality of English out there on the interwebs.
It's a nice compliment for Sir Trevor to be compared to the Medium editor, but as a matter of fact we started writing it in October 2011, and shipped the first version to production in March 2012 well before Medium was available - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_%28service%29
This is a quite interesting, it also displays the native Bold/Italic/Underline formatting in Safari on iOS when you select text which I don't think I've ever seen before on a webpage. Is that just part and part of having something contenteditable?
Holy wow, I really like it. It has the potential to be really diverse and huge, I mean, a block can essentially be anything. You could replace entire CMS with this. It's not often that something can say "the future of..." and mean it, but I feel like this can.
Orders of magnitude better than any other editor; great API and (obviously) made by a great team. We're going to be using it for everything we make at @makeshift from now on :)
Ehhh.... To be honest, I find the editor to be clunky and this would not be something I would enjoy using. Somebody enlighten me what's so great about Sir Trevor except that it comes with an MIT license.
Looks like a great editor that is simple enough for your average user to understand. It's only problem seems to be it's "IE 10+" requirement. I understand not supporting 6 and 7, fine, not supporting 8, okay that's Windows XP users, they are dying off, fine, but not supporting 9?
That being said I'll probably still use this somewhere and just deal with the support calls or try to get it to support 9 somehow, great work!.
Unlike concrete5 this actually gives out markdown so there's less worry about keeping control of weird/wasteful html. I like it uses the medium like editor since its less clutterful & Its exactly what I was looking for!
Checkthis certainly has a beautiful UI/UX. I like the fact that the add-content bar between blocks doesn't interfere with the block spacing (With Sir Trevor the add content bar adds height between blocks), and the grouping of blocks in the add menu of Checkthis is going to work better for a larger number of block types than the Sir Trevor horizontal list.
The drag-and-drop repositioning is also much slicker with Checkthis, as you get to see the other blocks shuffle around the one you're moving, rather than partially so with a copy of the block.
This is awesome! We've got plans at Blue Bay Travel, to completely rewrite our main sales sites, Caribbean Warehouse and Tropical Warehouse to use a block layout. Now that we're growing, we intend to keep the design limited but feel like content is always dynamic.
This is going to become a big part for us next year when we hopefully start the rewrite.
Nicely done! Plus, everyone is excited to use it because we all adore Sir Trevor!
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadI kinda wish there was a paragraph split operator; dupe the paragraph and you delete some (different) text from each.
At least in the example, there did not seem to be a way to undo things. This is a bit annoying, especially because it forces a confirmation step when deleting things. I think most common use-cases would be much better served by being able to undo a delete than having to confirm it each time. Even if you don't want to have a general undo button, I would prefer a GMail-style undo link that only pops up after you've deleted something to the current behavior.
Hmm, IDK. I can see that it could be a good way to represent and manipulate the chunks of text once you've got them, but having to click a special icon and choose the block type every time you add a new paragraph (rather than just pressing "return" for the most common case of a new text paragraph) seems pretty clumsy.
I currently work on a site that uses TinyMCE and inserting images, videos etc. is a nightmare. There's this combination of the burden of HTML sanitization and the illusion of total freedom that TinyMCE gives to content creators. Something with better separation of content types would be wonderful.
We also use a similar block (or widgets) approach for our editor, and it works really well for mixing all kinds of content in one editor.
Storing them as JSON objects with client-side classes that know how to render them also makes it really easy to add or extend the widgets later on.
Direct editing is becoming more common and therby acceptable I think.
I've seen this idea in the real word, and it fails with editors. If you provide WYSIWYG, editors expect to format content just like one does in Word or InDesign, absolutely positioning elements, and the result to be identical (which is obviously a problem nowadays with elastic layouts and mobile sites).
so i guess you followed the "release early" advice well...
-bowerbird
Had a little problem with one of the dependencies though (removed a line from the source of underscore.js to get it to work, everything else just works fine)
Good job.
Strange name though. Since the author is british, I assume it was named after this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_McDonald
Edit: "Brought to you by ITV.com" kind of confirms it
He's best known for being a good communicator, clear and concise, informative but never patronising. Which makes him quite a good 'patron' for a writing app.
One improvement to Sir Tevor would be to provide drag-and-drop ordering, which Concrete5 has today.
Off topic: Does anyone knows if there is comment system like medium have (individual comments for each paragraph)?
It kind of reminds me of the commenting system that was used for the GPLv3 draft: http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-2.html , for which the source code is here: https://gitorious.org/stet
The use case I am thinking about is crowdsourcing typo corrections --- while reading some text you see a type, click click and you submit a typo-fix to the author. Such a tool would vastly improve the quality of English out there on the interwebs.
That being said I'll probably still use this somewhere and just deal with the support calls or try to get it to support 9 somehow, great work!.
The drag-and-drop repositioning is also much slicker with Checkthis, as you get to see the other blocks shuffle around the one you're moving, rather than partially so with a copy of the block.
Sir Trevor is a good start though!
This is going to become a big part for us next year when we hopefully start the rewrite.
Nicely done! Plus, everyone is excited to use it because we all adore Sir Trevor!