Pattern-Based Tool Design for Shared Knowledge Construction - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 34

Figure 5. offlineCURE user interface

Figure 5 shows the user interface of offline-
CURE . The left area of the user interface shows a
tree-based overview of the content that is locally
available (1). Compared to the web interface,
this simplifies the navigation, since users always
have an overview of the local content available.
Context-sensitive menus allow users to perform
actions in relation to the selected object, e.g. cre-
ate a new sub-room in a room or delete a page
(2). Additionally, the offlineCURE user interface
offers static menus, keyboard shortcuts, and a
toolbar which provides support for incorporating
wiki-tags into the page text (3).
Figure 5 also shows three windows in which
the user currently edits CURE pages (4) or views
a binary page (5). Both edit windows are split
horizontally. The upper part is used for editing
Wiki pages while the lower shows a real-time
preview of the rendered page. The size of the
edit and preview areas is variable, i.e. users can
decide to display only the edit area while work-
ing on a long document, or use the preview area
on its own for browsing CURE content offline.

The real-time preview shows the page content
like it would be rendered in the user's browser
when working with the CURE server. This also
includes usable links to other documents, ex-
ternal URLs etc. Support for creating complex
structures is given by indicating whether internal
links on a page are valid, i.e. whether the linked
content is locally available and allowing users to
conveniently create content via context sensitive
menus attached to links. Compared to the web
interface, the offlineCURE user interface thereby
significantly improves the usability and workflow
when editing CURE content.
For working nomadically, offlineCURE allows
users to select the content for the disconnected
phases. This selected content is replicated to the
client application by using the n o m a d i C o b j e C t s
pattern.

n o m a d i C o b j e C t s

Problem : Users may not have a permanent con-
nection to the system where relevant data