Streams: inviting beta testers to provide feedback

Plugins
#1

If you are interested in testing a potential new version of Streams and providing feedback, please get in touch by sending a private message on this forum (click my user avatar and then choose “Message” and mention Streams in the title of the message). I will get in touch some time next month with a few users and share the beta version of Streams for feedback.

  • No technical knowledge is required.
  • You must be an existing user of Streams.
  • You will be provided with a list of specific changes to provide feedback on.

I have been working on a new version of Streams for some months on and off. While there is still work remaining that I consider not quite complete, I am also planning a complete rewrite of Streams based on parametrized transclusions as I believe it can alleviate some of the common pain points. The goal of inviting feedback at this stage is to determine which, if any, of the new features and changes I have worked on are worth publishing as they are before the rewrite of the plugin which may not be entirely backwards compatible in terms of features (but will be compatible with existing content in Streams).

5 Likes
#2

Will the streams plug in be updated only after the next big release of TW (5.3.0)

#3

I am honestly not sure at this point.

What are you hoping to get out of an update of Streams?

#4

Some of the things I am interested in are

  1. Option to add or edit tags/fields of the child nodes within the streams UI itself (may be using a button to hide and show the tag fields and field UI)
  2. Search within the stream tree as you have showed before in screencasts.
  3. Advanced templating - you have given me a template in the google group sometime back. I want to expand it to include nested child nodes also to the template if possible.
  4. Tiddler to use as new node template in the streams settings was not working when I checked sometime back. It would be nice if this can be fixed.
  5. It would be nice to have an option at the top of the parent stream tiddler (using select widget or via a search box) to select the desired template from a list of templates to be used for that particular stream tree.

Last three are related features. I just made them separate for clarity

#5

This is working actually. But it works from the second child node in my tests now. It would be nice to have an option to change the template at the node level (instead of changing the template in the streams settings) and as a result we can make a list of templates and select the template needed according to the context.

#6

I’m also very interested in the search/filter feature! Likewise in this potential performance improvement:

I’d started trying to implement a search feature myself a number of months ago, but set it aside when I saw that you were working on a new version.

#7

If there is a release of the Streams plugin before the eventual rewrite, of the features mentioned here the only one likely to be addressed is the search feature.

#8

I have revisited the last round of my work on Streams and have come to the conclusion that implementing the new features in a robust manner is going to be highly time consuming, and that the same time would be better spent on a complete rewrite.

To allow for insight into what I was working on, as well as user feedback that might influence the next iteration of Streams, I am sharing this experimental version of the plugin:

https://saqimtiaz.github.io/sq-tw/temp/streams-prerelease-beta.html

Please read the notes in that wiki very carefully. In particular I expect the implementation of the and collapse/expand all features and drag and drop to be very brittle. These bugs will not be fixed before an eventual rewrite.

5 Likes
#9

Where do you expect feedback? … Is it OK here? … It may get messy. …

  • Dropping features that depend on the position of the cursor in the editor, such as splitting the text at the cursor when hitting Enter, and hitting backspace at the beginning of a node to merge with the previous node

I would be OK dropping the “splitting” option. I needed to disable it. … But “backspace” to merge with previous was one of the good things.

my preferred settings

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I think I would prefer a CTRL BACKSPACE that merges with previous note independent of cursor position. So it’s not needed to move to the beginning of the text for a merge.

Having a distinct difference between saving and exiting editing a node, and existing without saving. So for example, ESC would trigger a dialog asking you to confirm if you want to discard changes and exit.

IMO having additional dialogues will slow down the whole writing experience. I don’t really care, where the text is stored, as long as there are no interrupts … So I would like to have no dialogues and “always save” even if I have the risk of data loss. For me it’s about brainstorming with a lot of typos and weird thoughts. :wink:

#10

The additional dialogue would only occur if you were cancelling instead of saving an edit, and had unsaved changes. So it should not slow down the writing experience at all.

The key difference is that right now ESC and Ctrl+Enter both exit the node being edited and changes are saved with every keystroke so there is no need for an explicit save. With the proposed changes ESC would cancel without saving and Ctrl+Enter would save and exit editing. Until you save the changes are saved as a temporary/draft tiddler, which is needed to alleviate performance issues when editing in larger streams.

(All keyboard shortcuts are configurable, I am just using the current defaults as examples.)