Comments on Annotations Proposal

Now that the bubble displaying the annotation when clicking on the icon has been implemented according to the proposal, I realized that it has some usability flaws:

• How do I make the bubble dissapear? There is no close button. Pressing ESC hides the box, clicking outside the box could hide it as well, but will the users know that?
• The delete button in the top right corner looks a lot like a close button, people will want to click that one to hide the dialog.

I think the UI elements should be rearranged to provide all needed functionalities and to avoid confusion.

I have troubles seeing how the integrated bar & filters should work and scale:

• the "Narrow annotations by clicking an annotator's name" acts on the annotation icons or on the annotation highlights? Please note that the current implementation has only one checkbox for the display or hiding of annotations (with icon and highlight), for the reason we discussed both on mail and in private discussion.
  • if it works on highlights, will highlight be checked automatically when one clicks an annotator name? (meaning that yes, highlights are visible but they are filtered)
  • if it works on icons, then shouldn't they all (the annotator names) be highlighted as "visible" when all icons are visible?

For this issue, I'd go with an approach for the functionality as it's designed for the non-integrated bar, meaning that when the checkbox is checked they're all visible and the authors are all checked (because all annotations are visible). When user unchecks some of the authors, the annotations are updated accordingly. However, to scale, this needs some "none" and "all" buttons, for the case when the authors are many.

• if there are many more authors, how does that panel scale? it's a 3 column panel and I'd say columns can get pretty narrow
• if a new filter is to be custom added, which is an intended feature for the annotations and very very likely to happen (since the annotations can have custom fields added one would like to filter by them) how would that filter integrate in this panel? Would it need to be completely redesigned?