I really appreciate what the omniref guys are doing, but I find these "posts" (maybe not the right word?) incredibly difficult to follow. I can't tell if I'm supposed to read the left pane, the right pane, the bubble? Do I click the quote bubbles? Does the left pane "track" the right pane?
A little hard to follow? Only because I've never seen it before. This is a great idea.
The publishing of code-as-narrative or code alongside narrative is something that will slip into the mainstream, maybe in our lifetimes.
Already, ruby code (and other similar languages) are nearly understandable by non-technical folks. And consider the popularity of tools like cucumber that involve tests that are readable by anyone.
Imagine a day when code is published on the New York Times homepage, alongside some Silicon Valley luminary's commentary.
In this case, the "bubble" is the thing...but yeah, it's a little noisy. Perhaps if we fuzzed out the background a bit when the annotation viewer (the bubble) is open it would help?
Please don't do this. It was immediately obvious to me which part was the part I was supposed to read. (And I've never visited this site before today!)
Look, man. Until one gets a sample size that's a fair bit larger than two, one cannot know whether the person professing confusion or the person professing clarity represents the more common case.
I personally managed to follow the series without difficulty, though I can sympathize with the parent's sentiment because I felt a brief moment of confusion when the page first loaded. Excellent write up though! Looking forward to going through the rest of the content after work today.
I'm no UX expert, but I think if you want story reading to be a core feature of your product it will have to have a core place in your layout, so not a pop up box. It would replace whatever currently is your main feature (I.e it would become the left bar).
I think the thing to do might be to detect if the page was loaded with the annotation open, then fuzz background. Otherwise, you know what you're looking at and explicitly clicked the open annotation button.
It's great that the site supports such deep linking.
My original comment was worded poorly. Left side blur should be on initial load if the referring url is not from the same site, not every time you open an annotation.
