Fluid 0.1

Owned by Anastasia Cheetham
Last updated: Nov 13, 2008Version comment
2 min read

Fluid 0.1 Release

What's New in Fluid 0.1

Well, this is our first release, so it's all new! The bundle includes:

  • Fluid Component library source code
    • Reorderer framework library
    • Lightbox component
    • markup examples
    • test files
  • Documentation
    • User Experience (UX) Toolkit
    • API documentation
    • Tutorials

Features of Fluid 0.1

  • Add the ability to reorder image thumbnails to your application.
  • Reorder arbitrary DOM elements in your application.
  • Keyboard accessibility for navigation and reordering.
  • Learn helpful design tips from expert Interaction Designers

General

  • With respect to mouse-based drag-and-drop, one cannot drop an orderable before any other orderable; the drop point is always after. In particular, one cannot place an orderable before the first item.
  • Pressing enter on a focussed thumbnail does not always display the full image after a drag-and-drop. The reason is that occasionally the wrong part of the thumbnail acquires keyboard focus, and pressing enter does not thereby activate the link.
  • The use of the dojo toolkit is not optimized for download. It is possible to create a dojo package that contains only the parts of dojo that a Fluid component needs. This will be done in a future release.
  • The key strokes that the Reorderer uses for navigation and placement were chosen based the ARIA W3C working draft: arrow keys to navigate, modified by the control key when moving an item to a new location. This may conflict with keystrokes defined by the browser, the OS, or an assistive technology. As such, the Reorderer may not function properly depending on the context.
  • Occasionally, a thumbnail in the Lightbox is only partially scrolled into view. If a user navigates to it using the keyboard, the view is not automatically scrolled with the result that parts of the thumbnail are clipped by the edge of the window - the entire thumbnail is not visible.
  • The Reorderer's concept of fixed items needs refinement. While a fixed item cannot be moved directly by the Reorderer, its position can be altered by the reordering of items around it. When the user moves, say, a list item to a new position within the list, any fixed list item in the same list changes location
    so as to not leave any "blank" items.
  • Reordering either via mouse-based drag-and-drop, or using the keyboard, is sometimes slow when there are a relatively large number of orderable items. In short, the Reorderer does not scale well with respect to the number of orderable items.

Internet Explorer Issues

  • Dragging a thumbnail in the Lightbox results in selecting all of the thumbnails that the mouse moves over. The other thumbnails are highlighted. This occurs when the click-to-drag gesture is done on the whitespace of the thumbnail.
  • Dragging items can freeze when done quickly. If the user moves the mouse relatively quickly while dragging a thumbnail in the Lightbox, it will freeze over the drop target, and the mouse cursor changes to a crossed-out circle. Releasing the mouse button has the result that the thumbnail is placed at the location where it froze. Furthermore, this problem is influenced by the number of items: the more items there are, the easier it is to freeze.