Media Panel in UIO

[Colin Clark]

Hi Anastasia,

I don't quite know the answer to these questions--they're good questions to ask, and I'm glad you brought them to the list.

I'm of two minds about where the responsibility for the media panel belongs--whether in UIO or in the VideoPlayer or somewhere else. For the style-based transformations, UI Options ships with the UI Enhancer, which is responsible for actually doing the work of transforming the page. In the case of the Media Panel, there's nothing that we can ship, out of the box, that performs the work of displaying captions or transcripts, etc. That logic resides in the delivery platform--in this case, the Video Player component.

We have planned for an architecture for UI Options where "a preference" has three key characteristics (components, if you want to think about it this way): 
 1. How it's rendered into the the UI Options view
 2. How it's data is formatted and persisted
 3. The actual work of actualizing the preferences

We want UI Options to take a bundle of configuration, allowing anyone to register a set of components for a particular preference. Presumably, the Video Player will be able to fulfill the work of #3 in the case of the various media preferences. And presumably users will have a palette of preferences views they can choose from, along with the components that do the work.

Jess' point, I think, was that we're on the cusp of a new UIO 2.0 redesign, based on the work Joanna, Nicole, and others are doing here:

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/User+Interface+Options+design+high+fidelity%2C+C.1

It's not fully clear to me yet when we should do the work to make UIO more extensible out of the box. It may need to happen very soon or it may be best to wait until the new year; I'm just not sure.

Are there reasonable and non-hacky but incremental steps we could take to integrate UIO and Video Player in places like the IDI site without having the full architecture in place?

What's involved, in terms of concrete work, to change the factoring of these two components?

Thoughts, everyone?

Colin

On 2012-11-12, at 2:27 PM, Jess Mitchell wrote:

> Anastasia,
> 
> This comes at a time when we're plotting the next steps for UIO, in particular the new designs. Let's make sure we're spending effort on something that will move us toward the upcoming design and development efforts.
> 
> Jess
> 
> 
> On Nov 12, 2012, at 2:07 PM, "Cheetham, Anastasia" <acheetham at ocadu.ca> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Hey, everyone,
>> 
>> The Floe team is incorporating the Video Player into the IDI website, and the process has raised some questions we thought we'd run by the community.
>> 
>> The Video Player adds an extra panel to UI Opions: the Media Panel. In addition to the default three (Text and Display, Layout and Navigation, Links and Buttons), the extra panel (called "Audio and Video") offers inputs for controlling captions and transcripts.
>> 
>> To support the ability to "plug in" extra panels in UIO, the Infusion framework was modified (these modifications are now in master). As well, the Video Player code includes a customized version of the UI Fat Panel template and some "framework-y" stuff (in particular, a 'modelRelay' used for conveying the extra preferences to UIO, but generalized as "a junction between an applier bound to one model and another").
>> 
>> We're considering the idea of folding the Media panel into UIO proper i.e. making it a part of the component out-of-the-box. It would be off by default, but integrators would be able to enable it if desired. To accomplish this, the "framework-y" stuff that's currently living in the Video Player code would likely be integrated into the Infusion framework and the Media panel template would be added to the other three templates.
>> 
>> We're wondering what people's thoughts are on this idea. What questions do you have about it? What do you see as the pros and cons? What issues should we be considering?
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> -- 
>> Anastasia Cheetham     Inclusive Design Research Centre
>> acheetham at ocadu.ca           Inclusive Design Institute
>>                                       OCAD University
>> 
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---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
http://fluidproject.org