Day One

Hey,

Quite a busy time I've had on day 1 trials. Rather than try and give you a play-by-play breakdown of what I've been up to, I'll highlight a bunch of points that I have to make.

Installing apture on a blog:

1) Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no way of installing apture if you don't have access to template html. If so, then that should be made explicit...

2) "Copy the following line to your site's HTML template, right before the closing (/body) (tag altered because blog whined) tag"

There should probably be a thumbnail picture, to sure where that is. When I installed in on the polyglottal at first, I but it after the (/body), you know, a la my usual scripting style. Whether that caused the crashing (described way below), I have no idea, but some more guidance would have helped.

Also, explaing what an HTML template is, and that it is sometimes difficult to reach depending on your blogger software, would be helpful... And I've just tried everything2, and installing apture on it is pretty much impossible. Makes sense, since it's not really a blogging platform, but could still be rather cool if that was explained.

Also, if you have your one privately owned collection of webpages you call your blog, you might like to explain that to users, though for all I know, the same instructions would work, even though the terminology (HTML template) wouldn't exactly carry across if they aren't using templates a la dreamweaver/frontpage.

3) Some UI/layout quibbles (ignore me if I'm being annoying):

Imho, you should move the block of text underneath the icon of the step in progress (see pic for details)

For each text in the installation, I think there should be more text explaining what's going on. e.g. what will happen after you do it? Add some screenshots?

The 'blog' link at the bottom might be replaced with 'apture's blog'... Just and idea.

4) After having installed it:

So I managed to install apture on a blogger blog. First I saw a javasript warning:

"

The current webpage (http://polyglottalstop.blogspot.com/) is not contained within the site for which credentials were requested.

Do you want to edit this site's list of URL prefixes so that this page is included? (Site administrators only)"

In the installation step, you should probably let users be aware that they might get a warning, and remember to tell users that they can click ok.

As soon as I did, the page I was on got re-routed to the apture 'my sites' page with no warning. This was especially confusing, since I couldn't find a configure template page in squarespace, I installed the blogger one first, so apture got confused. Maybe open a new window or frame for them?

Auto-link: "Apture can update existing links to certain media locations so that they appear in an Apture window"

I was bit unsure about what that meant exactly in terms of how my page will now look, until I saw apture in action. Perhaps some introductory thumbnails about what apture's like might clarify.

5) Using apture:

"To begin editing Apture-enabled pages, you first need to open the Apture Dashboard. This panel is probably already open in the top-right corner of your screen, but after you check "Don't show this next time" in the Welcome to Apture window, the panel will no longer open automatically"

How do you get it back again? I found out later, but some instruction on how to get it back again is always reasuring.

Language support for arabic:

I can't select blocks of text in arabic, once the editor is on. When it is, text gets selected, and when you let go of the mouse button, unselected. So I couldn't really link text. All I could do is click the add link at the bottom of the paragraph.

When you drag the mouse across trying to select Arabic text, some of it changes. Long since forgotten how to read Arabic, so I unfortunately couldn't tell you what is changing...

Also, it might be a good idea to search the Arabic wiki, exclusively if you select arabic text.

Most importantly, it crashed. When I selected a link in wiki for the end of the paragraph, the window went white. Everything went to shit from there, essentially.

I'm bushed, I've spent the last 3 or so hours on this, so I'll wrap up now and continue this post later, as there's a lot more to say. But here's a bit to chew on...