joseph/Monocle — Issue #87: 3.0 enhancement: replacing panels with new interaction model
Author: joseph
Created: 2012-02-03 06:45:22+00:00
State: open

The Panels approach is quite flexible for defining reader interfaces, but it does result in a few problems:

* the Stencil control is quite a hack
* I-Mode is fairly different from the way other readers work, leading to user experience dissonance
* overlaying panels don't really play nice with 'interactive' (scripted) or 'enhanced' (audio/video) books

I've created a branch for prototyping the replacement — _interaction-model_. It's based on the _retirements_ branch, and is slated to be one of the biggest changes in 3.0. I'm thinking we'll retire panels altogether for 3.0, so any Monocle applications that make heavy use of them might want to stay on the 2.x thread. There's [an experimental test (which describes the new model)](https://github.com/joseph/Monocle/blob/interaction-model/test/experimental/interaction-model/index.html) and [a prototype panel called 'Magic'](https://github.com/joseph/Monocle/tree/interaction-model/test/panels).

Support looks pretty good even for ancient versions of Android, Kindle, etc.

If this change is likely to be a problem for anyone, pipe up in the comments.