Troy, My sense of UI design is almost as good as yours, but I have a good amount of experience actually engineering the implementation of designs. If you need any help with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript I have been beating those into submission for a while now.
Best of luck finding a good designer! --Greg On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 12:23 PM, Troy A. Griffitts <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear CrossWire Volunteer, > > Many of you know that I've been working full time at Kurt Aland's institute > in Münster for the past 16 months and we've been developing the CrossWire > Community tools into something which can be used at the Institute here for > digital manuscript studies. > > The major components of the environment are complete now, and we've been > using the system inhouse for: > Manuscript Cataloguing > Digitizing > Indexing Biblical Content > Transcribing, and > Collating multiple witnesses to the same content to show differences. > > The general idea is to have a community workspace where scholars in this > field can meet and work together online. We've tried to join our > specialized components with an existing community collaboration framework to > achieve this. > > I'd like to explain the architecture later in this email, but what I'd > really like to solicit now is help with frontend design. Everyone around > here knows that I am a horrible UI designer and worse using HTML. If this > project sounds exciting to you, and you have a professional level of design > expertise, AND you are willing to contribute some time to dream up and > submit a mockup HTML user interface for the existing functionality, then we > would absolutely LOVE, and be ecstatically overjoyed to have your > contribution. Modestly, I think the functionality is pretty cool, but the UI > is ugly and not intuitive. Functionality means very little if no end user > can figure out how to use it! Please help! :) > > We are quickly approaching public announcement of these tools and it would > be a wonderful thing to give the site a facelift before sounding the call. > > The entry to the site can be found here: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de > > Please feel free to use the site and even create an account to play with > more features that aren't available unless you log in. With an account, you > will be able to create you own personal pages and arrange our components on > your pages how you'd like, and even play with CSS to try to make them look > nicer. If you'd like to completely redesign the HTML, please don't worry > about it communicating without backend services-- I will be happy to get > that working. If you'd like to grab the source for any of this, it is at: > http://crosswire.org/svn/community/trunk/ > > > The details below are not mandatory to know for the UI design. I can work > the design into the infrastructure, but if you have experience developing in > this technology stack, that would be an awesome bonus! > > So, basic 4-tier architecture: > > Standard relational SQL data store -> Java business objects -> Web API -> > HTML UI (as OpenSocial Gadgets living inside a CMIS, Liferay) > > The Data store and Java objects are internal use only, but starting at the > Web API, we hope to encourage external sites to use our system, and our own > UI components almost exclusively access our system through this API. You can > browse the functionality here: > > http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/community/vmr/api/ > > For example, to search for any manuscript page which contains John.3.16: > > http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/community/vmr/api/metadata/liste/search/?biblicalContent=John.3.16&detail=page > > How we use this API in our site is shown here (result of same search for all > pages with John.3.16): > > http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/manuscript-workspace?key=John.3.16&searchType=pages > > Or a variant graph of John.3.16: > > http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/web/test/collation?key=John.3.16&collate=graph > (you can drag that graph around and mouse-wheel zoom in and out) > > Our goal at the INTF is to make our research as widely available as > possible, so I am looking forward us making these tools available from our > software at CrossWire, and I also feel that supporting the work here, to > digitize more of the evidence for the transmission history of the New > Testament, is an important goal. > > Please prayerfully consider whether you might be called by our Lord to help > in this effort. Thank you for considering, > > Troy > > _______________________________________________ > sword-devel mailing list: [email protected] > http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel > Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: [email protected] http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
