We are proud to announce that finally floating blocks for Moodle are here! Thanks to Joan Codinas hard work and persistence, now it is possible to have a block that is both unobtrusive and visible from anywhere in a Moodle course; whether you are inside a particular module such as a Forum, a Quiz, a Chat or whatever or you are viewing a resource. You can see this by yourselves by going to http://parles.upf.es/TEST. Select the course named Assignments and enter as teacher : teacher. When you get inside the course, on the upper part of the screen (towards the middle), you will notice a little tool bar called Language tool bar. To see how it works simply double click any word from the text appearing on your screen and then expand the window of the tool bar by clicking on the + sign on the right side of the bar and expanding the window to the desired size by dragging it with your mouse to be able to view the results. Now, the beauty of this toolbar, besides its many potential uses, is that you can resize it at will and move it around wherever you want and, whats even better, you can choose to nail it to an absolute position of the screen (so that you can place it where it is not a nuisance and it will remain fixed in that position disappearing from the screen as you scroll down your page), or you can choose instead to make it a floating toolbar (so that it will be always visible in the same relative position of your screen as you scroll up and down your page). The default position of the tool bar is fixed but you can make it float just by clicking on the drawing pin/thumbtack icon . Just enter the course and enjoy. We hope you become as excited about this new development as we are. In the next message I will provide a few more details about this tool bar. Ah, one little warning. Joan is still fixing some little glitches that affect this tool bar when using IExplorer. We recommend to use Firefox for now. Josep M. |
Nice seeing walterzorn drag'n drop being put to good use.
Yes, in fact, this is based on walterzorn drag'n drop and it uses AJAX. If anybody has technical questions about the inner workings of this tool bar, Im sure Joan Codina will be happy to answer, but I can start by providing some additional information. Josep M. |
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Josep M.
Svar: Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Very nice thing you (all involved) have created.
I love seeing Moodle (and specially designed features)
used for something specific and advanced, in this case
language teaching. Moodle is fantastic but it is a technical
tool that should not be in focus itself but reside invisible
in the background. Lope de Vega said that 'La vida es sueno',
didn't he? Sometimes this comes true.
Felicitaciones! Anders
Re: Svar: Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Now if only we could stop global warming!
Josep M.
Svar: Re: Svar: Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
What would also be lovely is if the messaging popup window could be put in a floating window like that.
Gavin
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
cool work!
Just to inform you, it seems that there are some problems under Safari (MacOS X): When any text is double-clicked, the size of the font is decreased for near all the text in the page. And the popup block shows its buttons a bit unaligned.
Sorry for use this browser!
Anyway, it's really interesting! Congratulations!
Ciao
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Thanks for your comments. I will talk to Joan and see whether he can have a look at this problem. I don't know whether he has access to a Mac, though.
I know that he is having some problems making the tool bar behave well with IExplorer (but that was to be expected
). What I didn't expect is that something related to Macs/Apple, a superior brand, as everybody knows 
would misbehave for us.Josep M.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
that has been really unexpected!
How is possible that two true genius don't use a Mac?
Ciao
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
I was a grad student in the US around 1986 and I decided I needed a computer. I asked other students and also some professors which computer they recommended. They ALL said a Mac. This was the time when PCs just had 1 or two 5" floppy disks (no hard disks!) and they used DOS. If now you think Macs are superior to PCs, imagine then! I had used Macs in the computer lab and I was in love with them. I went to the store and they showed me a new model that was even nicer than the ones I had used. There was really no question that I wanted a Mac.
The problem was when they told me what the price was. I almost cried. I wound up buying a PC clone which costed about 1/4 of what the Mac costed. I really could not afford to buy a Mac. Later on I got a real job and my financial situation improved, so I could have gotten a Mac. But then it was too late. I had already gotten used to work with a PC and most people I worked with used PCs.
If only Apple would have allowed other companies to produce clones, they wouldn't have lost their share of the market the way they did. I don't know, maybe it was a good decision on their part. But that policy prevented many people like me to get hooked on a Mac.
Will you still be my friend after this horrible confession?
.Josep M.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Assuming you didn't change Moodle version here, just moved from one server to another, if you could use IE on the old server but not on the new one, then something must have changed/gone wrong with your move, it doesn't sound like a Moodle specific problem.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Although I don't know about what small (was it rhetorical?) company are you talking, personally I've to say you that I NEVER test web pages against Internet Exploter (it isn't a typo). Anyway, I test all my pages against XHTML, Firefox, Netscape and Safari (all of them have solid versions of their browsers for my Mac). IE for Mac is an absolutely outdated browser and I can guarantee you that, I make Moodle pages to work against it, then all the rest of browsers in the world will stop working (including Exploter for Win32). You decide...
About your phrase "that browser, which is used by the rest of the world", well, the world is really wide, you know? And there are a lot of people walking over it. I'm pretty sure that there are more people NOT using Exploter than people using Exploter. Sure!
Finally, I'm sure that all the Community will report problems under any browser and, if they can be solved, they are solved. More, I'm pretty sure that a lot of Moodle developers use they windows environment to program and test things under it.
Too many versions of Exploter could be a problem, yes, huge differences between minor releases of Exploter could be a nightmare. Bad standards assumptions by Explorer are bad, sure. Security issues with Explorer are dangerous, I think. Stupid firewall or privacy settings make normal things unusable in Exploter, too. The biggest software company in the world does Exploter, pathetic. Trying to "kill" the competence by supporting their own javascript, java, extensions, activex technologies and a lot of silly artefacts (windows update) under Exploter, incredible. Will fall continuously in favour of other browser alternatives, I hope it.
Uhm, it's 2:40 AM here. Now I'm relaxed. Just going to sleep a bit (wake up in 4 hours).
Ciao, Eloy
P.S: When I start talking about my personal opinion against (yes against) Exploter, I cannot stop. Please forget this discussion or I'll continue...
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
. But please, let's not start one of those loooong threads about Macs vs. PCs or how shitty a browser IExplorer really is. Not that I don't enjoy these kinds of "quarrels" myself 
. But if we go on like this, it will mean the end of the original thread and it could be useful to keep this thread to talk about "floating tool bars" and related issues, report problems, etc. Josep M.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
I 100% agree with you and I apologize for the off-topic discussion (I think its an unconscious attitude due to my radical feelings when somebody raises the Mac thing). But I stop it just now.
My primary goal was just to inform you about some issues under one browser (without any attempts to start any parallel discussion about OSs or browsers). The same problems seems to be present under Firefox too (reading other messages). Hope it was solved.
Sorry again, now, let's go with that amazing block....
Ciao
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
). Anyway, I hoped that my profusion of smilies would make it very clear that I wasn't annoyed at anybody. Moodle is a very SOCIAL tool/community so talking about the things we feel like talking, just like when we are in a pub with friends, is a tendency that I myself cannot avoid (as you very well know) . So, it's me who is sorry if I sounded too brusque.
Josep M
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Definitively, no!
Ciao
P.S.: My story is similar (but opposite). I had my fist Mac (the venerable Mac Plus with SCSI port!) in 1986 (my father had it). Since then, both at home and in the work I've used some Macs (SE/30, ci, vi, fx (runnig Unix!), LC 475, Quadra 840, PM6400, PM7200, PM9600, G4DP, iMac, eMac and G5DP). Not superior, but better for me, sure! I can relate a similar (a bit smaller) list of PCs used too, one thing that, sometimes, PC people comparing them cannot affirm (although they are categorical in their sentences).
P.S.: Anyway, I respect you, PC users. No problem!
[OT] The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Has anyone ever told you you have a Mac problem? :D
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
I told him when he shoed his tree iopd set for exaphonic sound!!
By the way... congratulations Josep Mª
Marc
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
| Hi Marc, Well, the kudos really must go to Joan. I've had something to do (not too much and not in the most interesting parts, I'm afraid) in the creation of the parallel corpus but he was the one that figured out the way to modify and adapt Walter Zorn's bar to integrate it into Moodle using AJAX technology to query the corpus by clicking a word. Pretty cool. By the way, it is ironic that we both live in Barcelona and we didn't manage to get our shit together to organize that informal Catalan BCNbeerMoodleMoot and get together this last summer as we were planning. Even more ironic, since we live in the same city, is that we will finally have the oportunity to meet, not in Barcelona but in the Canary Islands (in the Spanish MoodleMoot'05). I've already signed up for your DFWiki workshop and of course we will be able to finally have a beer . OK, ok I've gotten off track. But at least this is not yet another one of those Mac vs. PC or Firefox vs. IExplorer "fights"  .Josep M. |
we could even try to have finally the BCNbeerMoodleMoot even before Canarias,
still 2 months 2 to go! Maybe we can think of a date and place and invite Joan Codina, Joan Queralt and all the other moodlers in Bcn ( It seems that lately all the univerities in BCN have discovered Moodle.
Regards
Marc
. But OK, it seems like a good idea. Let's move this discussion to its original thread (BCNbeerMoodleMoot) and see if we can get our act together this time.By the way, I don't really know whether one can say (at least in our case) that all universities in Barcelona have discovered Moodle. In our university, individual people from two different departments have it as their VLE in their own departmental servers, but our university continues to use one of the most pathetic VLEs (I pray to the gods that Dean, University President and other administrators don't read this message
because otherwise I might be in trouble) I've ever seen. If only half the money spent in developing and maintaining this "thing" would have gone to adapt Moodle to their needs... Apart from the UPC, what other BCN universities have adopted Moodle as their official VLE?
Josep M.
Your're rigth Josep M,
only UPC has adopted Moodle as its official VLE, but google tells me that each day more university teachers are using moodle in barcelona and surroundings, so hopefully one day the centers will start moviong towards moodle.
Regards
Marc
| Yes, more and more professors in Barcelona and around the world are opting for Moodle and even abandoning the official VLEs in their own university in spite of the fact that by doing so they lose institutional support and technical assistance. Ironically many of these professors are those who are REALLY interested in applying so-called 'new technologies' to improve learning (I'm not talking about myself, I have a number of specific colleagues in mind, both in my university and in other universities). So, most of the time, the ones that stay with whatever the university gives them are the people who are really reluctant to use VLEs and wouldn't even use them if they weren't sort of forced or nudged to do it. So, yes the trend you observe is very possible and maybe the "authorities" will in the end surrender to the evidence and jump on the bandwagon. I think, at least in my university, if eventually there is going to be a VLE "revolution", it will be a grass roots revolution. I don't expect much from our administration, to tell you the truth. The VLE our university has is the house brand and, as you probably know, my university is very brand conscious and totally obsessed with image. Somebody who is not too bright and who is paid loads of money without being held accountable for anything must have come to the stupid conclusion that what brings "prestige" to the university is to have their OWN VLE rather than having one that really works and does what is supposed to do. I don't have the figures, but I'm fairly sure that they could have even bought licenses for a decent proprietary VLE such as WebCT for less money than what they've spent developing and maintaining the pathetic thing we have. But for these "brilliant" minds that are in charge of the administration here, having the name of our university associated with a FOSS VLE must not be "socially" acceptable and might bring a "bad image" (oh, if I could tell you how obsessed they are with image, I have stories you would not believe, maybe in the BCNbeerMoodleMoot ).
I don't know this for sure, but knowing some of the types that populate
the "high" places of my institution and having lived in the "culture"
of our university for quite a long time, I wouldn't be surprised if
their reasoning went along these lines. I'm not really proud of this
culture but I need to pay my bills . So what I usually do is try to find ways around all the complications that this peculiar culture imposes. Josep M. |
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Heh, wasn't one of the basic ideas behind Mac that's it's a computer that doesn't need a genius to run it
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
I'm also in the language teaching and SLA research business, and this is definitely a great add-on to Moodle
After reading Eloy's comment, I did some cross-browser testing:
- Win XP, Firefox 1.06: After double-clicking any word on a given page the font size is reduced for (most of) the text on the page.
- Win XP, IE 6: No problems here at all
- Win XP, Opera 7.54: the toolbar does show up but it doesn't work at all: Neither double-clicking nor highlighting works, and entering words manually doesn't work either.
- Win XP, Opera 8.5: double-clicking a word doesn't work, but highlighting and searching manually work just fine
TIA,
Markus
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Glad to get to meet moodlers who are in the "SLA research business". Thanks a lot for taking time testing the 'language tool bar' with so many browsers. Your report is rather surprising and makes the whole problem a bit more puzzling. I've tried it with a combination of Win XP and Firefox 1.07 and I have no problems at all. However with Win XP, IE 6 I experience problems expanding the window by dragging the lower right corner with my mouse
.Anyway, concerning your request for the release of the code, we wanted, of course, to get to a point where the tool bar became more stable with a wide
range of browsers before releasing it to the public. I don't know whether Joan has read these postings yet. I don't want to speak for him and he will, of course, have to decide what to do. I do know, though, that he is pretty busy right now and I'm afraid that he might not have time to fix all the problems with all the browsers. I'm not a developer and I have no idea about how much time might be needed to fix all these problems but I am very aware of the fact that the world of browser compatibility is hellish.
I know that Joan is working hard on trying to fix the problem with IExplorer. Perhaps what we will do is try fix it so that it can at least be used without problems with Firefox and IExplorer on PCs and then release it so that other people can continue to work on it to fix the rest of problems with other browsers. You see, I asked Joan to help me with this tool bar as part of a project to create a tool which would be used by students in language and translation courses at our university. Practically 100% of them use either Firefox or IExplorer. So, unless the fix is easy, that would be the end of our involvement in the development of the tool bar. I don't want to abuse Joan's kindness and patience by asking him to spend many more hours than the ones he has already spent with this. Actually I've asked him to help me with other kinds of improvements and jobs which are more of a priority for us than total browser compatibility.
So, if there are other people in the developer community that are willing to lend us a hand in solving these issues with browser compatibility, the code will be available very soon and we certainly welcome their contributions.
Josep M.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
We are going to release the code as soon as possible, but first we must solve some of the problems that are still there:
Known problem: Font size... this is a stupid error in the html generated because the original font was too big and the redefinition of font applies, in some pages, to all the page instead to only the pop-up window.
Compatibility problems:
IE: there are two problems, window resizing (working on that) and combo boxes(is a reported bug of IE)
Opera and Safari, maybe we could release the code with some indications to allow some volunteers perform the correct update. Basically I suppose is a problem of detecting which is the browser and perform specific arrangements for it.
Moodle Block alternative: In our test site there is a
"translation block" is a Moodle block that uses Ajax
techniques to update its contents without page reload, now is set for
language translation but it can be used for any other uses. It's very
simple to use and integrate. It has some drawbacks for being a Moodle
block: The size (basically the width) the position cannot be changed,
and is not available everywhere.
As Josep M. posted one of our
goals was to keep the code as independent of existing Moodle code as
possible. We are a bit afraid that if the code developed does not get
into the Moodle distribution then the maintenance of that code can
become a problem. We have other patches (count words in assignment
and copy activities) that as not being part of Moodle we must take
care of them and after every code update, test and re_integrate into
our Moodle
After posting it i saw the Josep post, i think that me and Josep where writing the "same" post in parallel...
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
Fantastic work!
I'm guessing that I will have to learn Ajax to develop with this?
I can see this being a great way to handle a reference add-on I am trying to develop. In this case, resources and activities can have links to other references associated with them (kind of like a glossary entry for an entire resource). I imagined them being displayed in an editable block, but this might be better.
I await the release of your code...
mike
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
It can be usefull for example for tabbed courses, where the current tab is reloaded under request, but not the complete course page.
Not so difficult, just a few calls.
Josep and Joan, great tool. Will offer so much flexibility to Moodle.
This discussion I will use as the trigger to write about two important aspects of future Moodle development: A central DHTML library and Moodle design. I notice every now and then isolated developments into different directions and developers trying to reinvent the wheel. The central and homogenous approach would make work much easier.
Do you know Cross-Browser.com, a cross browser library with many DHTML functions? I propose to integrate this library into Moodle (there are some more, I use this one - it works good and the developer is very active working on further developments). Every DHTML functionality can then centrally be used from this library - like the other Moodle APIs. And they most probably will work without the need of time consuming debugging processes necessary for individual solutions.
Now I change hats from the developer to the theme designer
Could you consider to use icons already being used for Moodle - I have seen your "plus" icon and ask, why do you not use the plus sign used at other places? Using the same icons integrates your block even more into Moodle than different icons.
Urs
Josep M.
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
There are two key aspects in our develpment:DHTM and Ajax. Moodle could (should) move towards this direction to allow faster response time. This is crucial when creating courses.
Which DHTML library use? I think that this needs an evaluation process about functionality, code quality, support... But if Moodle chooses one, then all new developments should use that one.
I've been using the icons allready in moodle except for the fix/float that did not exist. Its true that the +/- sign look different but they are from the moodle distribution.
I did a check i use the ones from /t/pix while the block takes it from /pix. I'll change it.
The problem with the changes in font size of the page is solved...
Other browsers (IE.. ) maybe tomorrow
Re: The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
. If this is not possible then ... is more difficult. I found that the error comes from an incompatibility between overlib and wz_dragdrop the library used to build the window. It seems that overlib is only used in the callendar but is included in every page. I've tried to update both libraries to the last version, but the problem persists.
For me is very difficult to trace both codes. I don't have tools to do so. I'll try to post in some forums asking for help.
Here is my first one...
Any help?
