[	Tags	|	hacks, liveurls, tech, ui, web, webmarker	]
[	Current Location	|	Hosur	]
[	Current Mood	|	lazy	]

Web Marker does not have a great UI. It is rather in-efficient to select text and move the mouse over to the toolbar to highlight the selection (the context menu option was'nt very friendly either). Taking inspiration from word processors and going a step further, Toufeeq and I have revamped the Web Marker UI. Now Web Marker supports a mark mode (just like emacs and Vim). In this mode selected text is automatically marked at the end of the selection event. The Mark Button toggles between the normal mode and the mark mode. In the normal mode, hitting the mark button does either of the following actions:

1. Marks selected text, if any. Web Marker stays in normal mode.
2. If there is no selected text, Web Marker switches to Mark mode. From here on text selections are automatically highlighted.

Toufeeq brilliantly came up with the above UI behaviour. It is interesting to compare this with the feature available in current word processor like applications. The formatting buttons such as highlight, bold, italics etc. have to enabled every time a text selection is to be formatted. Rather in-efficient, isn't it? Try out the 0.4b version of Web Marker to see how it makes marking web pages a breeze.

Another small thing that made into this version of Web Marker - all buttons of the toolbar are available as floating buttons i.e. they can be attached to any of the existing Firefox toolbars. This lets you save on screen estate. Having a toolbar occupy that much of space was'nt the greatest piece of UI.

Please try it out and let us know. We are hearing.