Thoughts on Future Developments

[chaosarium]

Hi! It looks like there's been lots of work going into LWT in the past few months. I really enjoy LWT's approach and will try to contribute in any way I can.

So far, I have noticed some problems in the newest version (2.2.0). I also have a bunch of ideas in mind about LWT that I think might be helpful for the community to consider.

Problems when using current version

I have noticed saveral problems with the current version that still make me hesitate to migrate from my fork. I opened a new issue for each of them. Here's a summary:

• Recursive span and laggy long text #8
• Video in the /media folder don't show up in the "or choose a file in" dropdown menu #9
• Playback control button icons still missing #10
• Reflecting number 1 in status charts #11
• Tag breaks text modification #12

Questions about user experience

• Location of playback control? - As far as I'm aware, the current version puts the playback control at the bottom, so controlling playback requires scrolling all the way to the bottom, which I feel is less efficient than the old LWT with sticky playback control. I wonder if this is an intended feature or if there should be a setting to control where the playback control is.
• Sticky panels? - Sometimes the lookup panel slides in and blocks content. I wonder if there should be a way to make panels sticky for things like heavy lookups, for example. Perhaps sticky panels like those code editors might help.

Feature ideas

• Text to speech for individual words. I've already worked on this a little bit on my branch (commit chaosarium@8637e92). I don't think it's the most elegant solution but it's a proof of concept
• Offline dictionary?. I have experimented with running a local server that serves a .mdx dictionary, but it didn't work quite well, especially because lwt treats each inflection of a lemma separately. (for example, looking up "spoke" doesn't work because the lemma is "speak")
• Add setting to toggle status chart scale. I hard-coded the log-scale charts in commit chaosarium@bed0689 for my personal use, but this might not be everyone's cup of tea.
• Allow icon themes?. I feel like this might be necessary if LWT wants to allow more theme customisation or update its interface to a more modern look.
• Lemma possible? A language tool similar to LWT, https://www.vocabtracker.com, has an option to use lemma

  Use Variant: words like "took", "taking", "taken" will be treated as different words.
  Use Lemma: words like "took","taking","taken" will be treated as one word, which is their lemma "take".

• Double click on word to jump to video location. I enjoyed the ability to jump to the approximate time in audio when doubled clicked on a word in the text. I think it helps to have this feature for videos too.
• Resize video player? Right now videos seem squashed and hard to see.
• More theming? I feel like LWT's interface could look much better and there could be more themes. I do front-end development so this might be something I can help. This isn't the top priority right now though.

[HugoFara]

Hello!

Thank you for your interest! I will try to get through your main points of concern.

Bugs

Well, we will address them in their respective threads. Thanks for signaling them!

User Experience

• Location of playback control. That's ... a bug. I may have moved it unintentionally, this will get fixed as soon as possible!
• Sticky panels. What kind of panel are you talking about? The iframes on the right when reading (containing dictionaries for instance)?

Ideas

Just create issues/discussions when you have precise ideas, it will help us track progress :)

• Video player. I had to find an equilibrium between the size of the video, and space used on screen. I considered that the video itself was not very useful since users should be reading the text. I may make it a little bigger though.
• More theming. Indeed, is the interface has an "old" aspect: lots of little icons. It may need an important refactor. For now I want to focus more on "making the interface customizable", so that the community would be able to go further with themes!