Preview Tooltips
Good news! LiveClick 0.3.2.0 will include an oft-requested feature: preview tooltips. Currently when you move your mouse cursor over a live bookmark item, a tooltip (aka hover box) will appear showing the full title of the item (only useful if the title is so long that it’s cut off in the menu). In the upcoming version of LiveClick, you’ll see the full title plus a preview of the item:
One of the reasons I didn’t include this feature until now was because I wasn’t sure how to store the additional feed data. Truth be told, I’m still not sure. When Firefox retrieves a live bookmark, it fetches the feed and stores only the most basic data: the title and URL of each live bookmark item. The feed contains other information—like summaries, dates, authors, etc.—that Firefox completely ignores. In order to get the preview, LiveClick has to fetch the feed (again), parse it (again), and store the info we want. The first two tasks are simple enough; Firefox includes services to handle the fetching and parsing of feeds. The last task is also rudimentary, but the question is where to store the previews.
Here are some approaches that I’ve considered. None are ideal, because there always seems to be a trade off between space and speed (in the form of hard drive space or RAM and bandwidth or processor):
1) Fetch and parse feeds at the same time Firefox checks live bookmarks. Store in the places database. This is the worst case, I think. It uses the most bandwidth and storage space and taxes the processor at a time when it’s already working hard. On the other hand, the previews can be generated almost instantaneously when requested.
2) Wait until the user hovers over a live bookmark item, then fetch and parse the appropriate feed to generate the preview. Store the feed data temporarily so LiveClick doesn’t have to fetch and parse again if the user hovers over another item of the same feed. There is a small wait time (depending on how quickly the feed can be fetched the first time). The savings in bandwidth is offset if the user requests previews of the same feed over and over and over again.
3) Same as #2, except after parsing the feed, we store the data permanently in the places database. Users still have to wait a few seconds for the first preview to generate, but additional bandwidth is never required. Cost is space, but not nearly as bad as #1 since we’re not storing every feed.
I’ll try out the second technique for a few days to see if it’s good enough. Until then, there are still a number of wrinkles that need to be ironed out. The preview doesn’t strip out HTML tags yet, nor does it handle unicode very well. There’s also the question of how large the preview should be. Right now, I have it set to show only the first 300 characters.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, I’m happy to hear them.
Posted on Dec 05 2008 at 01:12 PM
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The new preview tooltips feature is awesome - works like a dream! Thanks for adding this incredibly useful functionality.
Posted by Adrian B on 02/02 at 06:58 AM