Mindat toolbar

I use firefox and it shows up at the bottom. I don;t have probs with it i love it. and since its customizeable I think i'll like it more. i gotta play around with it tomorrow onmy day off >:D<

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A buena hambre no hay pan duro

Oddly enough, it took me two days to recognize the tool bar anyway :), maybe because I have ample space on my monitor. Have not yet tested its functions, though.

Cheers

Harry

Well, this is being rolled out at the conference for the very good reason that it's being launched at the conference!

For those of you who are not attending the conference, I'll explain everything once I'm back!

Jolyon

Over engineered. That is my name for it.
Mindat was great as it was, if it aint broke, why fix it?

I like to have control over my own computer, and I would ask, politely, for this bar to be made user-optional.

Eric :(

United Kingdom, Cornwall

To sum the thread up so far we can say: the new toolbar does not sit well with many users. To be honest: I don’t like it either.

The reasons for not liking it are more in the direction of its content and not in the fact that it is always there, but also in its “usability”.

The content I dislike are the so-called “social networks”. Maybe I am too old for this kind of crap, but I consider them to be data collection endpoints where unsuspecting people are seduced to enter personal data which in turn is exploited by some mega-companies for monetary gain.
I concede that in the times we are living in it is probably a matter of survival to be represented in those antisocial networks (at least in the long-term view if you want to attract young people). I just hope that this does not further the negative side-effects of these networks. Blatant disregard for copyright is just one of them. Just to give you an example read [www.mindat.org] and you will see what I mean (I have allowed Mindat to use this photo, but I have definitively not given permission to use it on Facebook). The problem here is that people who have fallen into the Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn-Google-trap in most cases don’t even consider such minor issues like intellectual property. I have not stopped posting photos on Mindat, but I am sure there will be a lot of people who will, seeing that their work is pilfered.
In addition to these problems there is also the matter of additional bandwidth. We are forced to download additional (unwanted) content with every page we load. No problem if you have all the time in the world, and an unlimited data-plan, but what about those that do not want to wait for things they don’t want in the first place, and also have to pay for it? And the Facebook-plugin even continues to send request after request while you are reading unsuspectingly, adding “just” 2 kilobytes per request to your bill and that every 10 seconds or so.

But I retract: we will probably have to live with that crap.

There are hundreds of studies (some of the available freely on the internet) that pinpoint the “hotspots” where users are most comfortable to look at on web-pages. The bottom of the page is definitively not where important UI features are supposed to go.
Don’t get me wrong – I am not opposed to change! To the contrary, I welcome it if it is an improvement! Many people opposed the changes introduced with Microsoft Office 2007 and its Ribbon interface (for those who know it), but as of today I freely admit that I do not want to go back to the old UI, because the ribbon is so much more practical.
I see many of the design principles of the Office ribbon interface in the new Mindat toolbar, and that is good so! But why not go the whole way and combine the toolbar and the menu bar at the top of the page?
I have taken the liberty to create a “quick and dirty” mockup of such a new, ribbon-like menu bar (see attachment). A whole bunch of “quick access” features could be implemented that really would make working with Mindat so much easier. Just think of the example that hovering over the “Message Board” field would open a drop-down that allows you to select a category or group within the forum, and you can go immediately to where you want with one click of the mouse. The invention of Microsoft called XMLHttpRequest even would allow those fora to me marked, where new entries are available.

…just my two cents.

Branko

Well said Branko,
I agree 100%

Pierre

Hi all,

It seems that I am not the only one who finds this new toolbar nearly useless. The boring thing is that it pop's-up.
Let's go thru it:

The little house is the, already present, Mindat icon on the upper left hand side to refresh the page.
The handlens is the search tool who is already present at the botom of the homepage.
The Updated mineral entry can be interesting when you are a systhematic collector or professional mineralogist, otherwise ....
The Minfind logo is already present among the dealer banners.
The F is the shortcut to Facebook. I am ( and I hope not the only one ) NOT a fan of the Zuckerberg experience and will NEVER join.
Like Branko said, I have nothing to hide but dont want my whole pedigree pread out of the internet. I will consider joining when I will become a movie star or succesfull pop star. I don't know how I would react seeing one of my images on Facebook. I only upload to Mindat. Many other sites asked me for, but I refused.
The T is the link to twitter. Again a site to join.
The In is the same. Like these, there are 13 in a dozen.
The + is like I said above, 13 in a dozen.
The +1 is the same, sign in in +1
The last is again a Facebook shortcut who says : I like it. What to do if you don't ? It's easier to ask a question where the answer can only be positive so you can ignore the others.
I am probably old fashion but these things are useless to me.

Jolyon, I like enormously what you do and Mindat is my daily tool. I uploaded more than 750 pics. That means that I like to work, with you and all the other contributors, on the improvement and expansion of Mindat and I will go on uploading data.
Awhile ago, you asked us to tell you what we would see as an improvement for Mindat.
Maybe I didn' read all the answers but I can't recall that the contributors asked for a pop-up banner like this. If they did, sorry for this phrase. What with the other idea's ? It looks like we received what we didn't ask for and that ( for the moment ) nothing much is happening with the rest.

Considering this, I would like, just like Eric, to ask you politely to make this banner more user friendly and not as a pop-up on every refresh of the page or as a little icon we can access easily, when we want.
I hope you dont mind my remarks.
Thank you.

Take care and best regards.

Paul.

there's something fishy in Denmark.

Devil's advocate here: this is Jolyon's business - his bread and butter - social media is the current trend - for better or worse, it is going to be part of our daily online experience whether we "like" it or not. (Pun not intended). (Or maybe it was! :) )

It's all about clicks and site visits.

I can appreciate the hardship those of you are experiencing as far as computer browsers not supporting the toolbar. My own gripe about this roll-out and others is that it was not announced - the membership was not alerted - I think we, the daily users and contributors deserve some notice. If I read between the lines, it sounds like even the managers were not aware.

Also, while I appreciate the Jolyon's preference to save this announcement for the conference, I'm not so sure that I appreciate launching a new element and then not being available to attend to the glitches that crop up.

Maggie

Hello,

I am not enthusiastic about another toolbar popping up with facebook and twitter etc.

Volker

So is this text window going to get a scroll bar or something?

Fred - the layout bug is fixed now (at least in Firefox, I haven't tested it in Internet Explorer yet).

You will be able to remove all the facebook/twitter/etc options from the toolbar when I have the configuration added. So please be a little patient for that - I think that will be ready within 2 weeks.

And in reply to Paul

> The little house is the, already present, Mindat icon on the upper left hand side to refresh the page.

So many people have complained that they don't know how to get back to the home page when they are logged in - they don't realise the mindat logo can link them back. So this is for them, not you.

> The handlens is the search tool who is already present at the botom of the homepage.

It will be removed from the bottom of all pages. The search button will then become more powerful, with more options.

I will also add an option to stick the toolbar to the physical bottom of the web page rather than the bottom of your web view - although this means you have to scroll the page to get to search options, etc, I think some of you would prefer this - and it may be necessary for devices such as the iPad.

Jolyon

And you also haven't noticed that the toolbar changes on certain pages.

> What with the other idea's? It looks like we received what we didn't ask for and that ( for the moment ) nothing much is happening with the rest.

Lots of new things are happening and becoming available. But I have to tell people at the conference about this first.

On Thursday evening I will discuss everything here.

Jolyon

The toolbar was tested on the following systems:

Internet Explorer 8, Windows XP *
Internet Explorer 9, Windows 7
Mozilla Firefox 4, Windows 7
Mozilla Firefox 4, Mac OS X 10.6
Mozilla Firefox 4, Ubuntu Linux
Google Chrome 12, Windows 7


It was not tested on older browsers than this (eg IE7) because there is no good reason to continue to use these browsers - you should upgrade.

Some features are not available on Internet Explorer 8, so if you use Windows XP you really should switch to either Firefox 4 or Chrome, IE8 will cease to be supported by mindat.org soon

Jolyon

> Also, while I appreciate the Jolyon's preference to save this announcement for the conference,
> I'm not so sure that I appreciate launching a new element and then not being available to
> attend to the glitches that crop up.

I just fixed the glitch :)

Jolyon Ralph Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > Also, while I appreciate the Jolyon's preference
> to save this announcement for the conference,
> > I'm not so sure that I appreciate launching a
> new element and then not being available to
> > attend to the glitches that crop up.
>
> I just fixed the glitch :)

so I see! Thanks, you multi-tasker, you! Have a [insert beverage of choice] on me!

Although I did find this rather interesting and amusing earlier:



What, Java beats toolbar?? B)

Will the new Mindat features work under the latest version of Firefox? I see that there is a new version 5.0.1 available for download at Link to latest version of Firefox. Is it okay to have two different browsers on the same machine and use either, depending on one's browsing preferences?

Best wishes,
Tim Blackwood
Cohasset, MN, USA

"Is it okay to have two different browsers on the same machine and use either, depending on one's browsing preferences? "

I have 5 different browsers on my computer. It gets a bit tricky if you want to run different versions of the same browser.

Hi David,

Thanks for the info. I've heard that it's a bad idea to run multiple anti-virus programs on the same computer, but didn't know if the same rule applied to other types of software (i.e. web browsers). Learn something new everyday. Now I just have to download it and set it up. Shouldn't be too difficult, should it? I'm not really all that computer saavy.

Best wishes,
Tim
Cohasset, MN, USA

Tim, I use Firefox 5 and the toolbar works fine.