scribefire 2.1
I'm giving the venerable ScribeFire blogging add-on for Firefox another go.
In many ways it feels like a more solid tool than it did in the pre-2.x days but there are still some bits that still feel kinda clunky to me. Stacked sets of tabs and that ancient seamonkey splitter widgets for resizing the panels are a couple of UI bits that could use some cleanup.
Another area of some clunkyness is the category selection list and post options like timestamp, buried off in some tabbed panel to the side, rather than in the toolbar/title/formatting area with other post-related tools. I think the ScribeFire logo area to the right of the title form would be a much better location for a category select widget for blogs that support one category per post, or an auto-completing, comma-separated tag/category field for blogs that support multiple categories/tags.
Also, the share, configure, and info tabs are just wasting space. Share should just live in a browser context menu and be activated from the blog post itself (or any other page.) Configure and app info should be accessed from the add-ons manager preference.
Finally, the main compose panel needs some min-height and min-widths or something to keep the save/publish/delete/etc. buttons from getting pushed out of view.
What I like about the new version, though, is a lot more interesting than what I don't. Tabbed editing of posts makes managing a few in-progress posts much easier to manage. The YouTube and Flickr integration is quite nice and makes me want more (more sites, more search options, and saved/recent list or something like that.)
Overall, good progress and I hope to see more.
Update: Ugh. Why the <br /><br /> tags rather than, you know, actual paragraphs?
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
Points taken. Much of this is due to "It was like that when I got here" syndrome, but even if I had originally designed it so, there is the barrier of the users not knowing where feature X has moved to, so changing the UI is a sticky wicket.
The
tags are what the editor creates. I suppose we could try and convert that.
Posted by: Christopher Finke | May 1, 2008 9:12 PM
Christopher, I hope my crit was taken as constructive. I think you've done some great work taking ScribeFire forward and I hope it continues. After I've used it a bit longer, I might have some more concrete suggestions for improvements.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | May 1, 2008 9:19 PM
When I look at ScribeFire screen shot and recall me why Firefox don't have split window view. Is any add-on out there?
Sometime, I do want to look at two sites side by side.
Posted by: Alex Peng | May 2, 2008 6:57 AM
Good to see you posting about ScribeFire especially in the light that it's the only blog editor extension out there for Firefox (forget Deep Sender--trash). This is one tenacious add-on and for one, I'm grateful that Chris picked up the development from Jed Brown of the original crew of Performancing.com. I worked with Jed on the first rounds of testing and enhancements way back when. He'd build it and I'd proceed to trash it. :D
I've been using this editor since it first came out as PFF (Performancing For Firefox) and currently using 2.1 in Firefox 3 nightly builds and while I wouldn't be without it, I've had two main complaints since day one. The tags instead of regular paragraphs as you pointed out and no place to insert image or hyperlink "alt titles" within the respective dialog boxes, alt titles being a requirement for proper SEO (this is scheduled to be added I believe). Sure you can code in the alt titles in the code view yourself but the average blogger today wouldn't know how to do such things and I'll admit that I have a mental block against coding (x)html by hand.
Posted by: Kirk M | May 8, 2008 7:43 AM
Good to see you posting about ScribeFire especially in the light that it's the only blog editor extension out there for Firefox (forget Deep Sender--trash). This is one tenacious add-on and for one, I'm grateful that Chris picked up the development from Jed Brown of the original crew of Performancing.com. I worked with Jed on the first rounds of testing and enhancements way back when. He'd build it and I'd proceed to trash it. :D
I've been using this editor since it first came out as PFF (Performancing For Firefox) and currently using 2.1 in Firefox 3 nightly builds and while I wouldn't be without it, I've had two main complaints since day one. The tags instead of regular paragraphs as you pointed out and no place to insert image or hyperlink "alt titles" within the respective dialog boxes, alt titles being a requirement for proper SEO (this is scheduled to be added I believe). Sure you can code in the alt titles in the code view yourself but the average blogger today wouldn't know how to do such things and I'll admit that I have a mental block against coding (x)html by hand.
Posted by: Kirk M | May 8, 2008 7:44 AM
Sorry about the double post. Don't know what happened there but I usually don't repeat myself like that. :D
Posted by: Kirk M | May 9, 2008 10:53 AM