Sage Usability Improvements

This unofficial wish list is adapted from this repository. Please feel free to add or clarify ideas, link to trac tickets, make comments, reorganize items, point out useful links, etc.

Documentation

• LaTeX doc mode.

• Use $ instead of back ticks for math in reST - #6892.

• Use Sphinx for sagenb.org docstrings.

  • Depending on how much stress this puts on a server, we could use a less expensive hash function or hash only part of the incoming docstring. Better yet, pass the object's fully qualified name to set_introspect_html() and hash just that for introspection of read-only code.

• reST mode(s):
  1. replace tinymce by reST editor?

     • You might be able to make TinyMCE *be* a reST editor. See this example of making TinyMCE into a BBCode editor.

     • reST's implicit closing tags may make this difficult.
  2. %rest in cells, and get reST output.
     • Should this be HTML output from Sphinx? If so, perhaps we should put the Sphinx-ify code in its own module or a utility function.

• Document pexpect interface for users.

• Live introspection cells.
• Introspection cross links.

• Tear-out docstrings - #6001.

Notebook

Admin

• Streamlined deployment - account management, fewer bugs, etc.

• Captcha for notebook sign-up - reCAPTCHA.

• LDAP authentication. (tdumont)
• Guaranteed worksheet-server synchronization.

• Reduce data loss possibilites. (dataloss.txt)

• Recover passwords. (Byungchul Cha)
• Email address as username.
• Add users as admins. (fprimex)
• User groups.

• Security -- see http://www.gingerlime.com/20090901_securing_sage_notebook.pdf

• Functions to delete worksheets/USER/*/BLAH where BLAH is cells, code, data, or snapshots? Does this affect the size of .sws files?

• Balancing server_pool:

I managed to do a little of this by exporting the directory that the
notebook is running in via NFS to the other machines and maintaining
the same permissions and file structure for everything else.  However,
this raised another issue in that not all my machines are of
comparable power.  How complicated would it be to add something that
allows you to balance how many processes go to each server?  I'm
thinking something along the lines of distcc's host list.

• Account approval:

> We have a small server and would like provide SAGE (in form of the
> notebook) for the students. However, it maybe a bit
> "risky" (especially, we have no experts to manage it) to open it up to
> everyone. So we would like to have some kind of "account approval"
> procedure. Can that be done, if so how?

Users

• See http://routes.groovie.org/ to eliminate twist.py

• Sage could (and should!) ship copies of the jsmath fonts, and explain clearly what to do to install them whenever they aren't already installed. The current system, which involves visiting the jsmath website in response to subtle hints is not very good.

• Fix TinyMCE issues, as mentioned here: http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_frm/thread/4cd1cc188470c723/c2477e1bdba68028?q=tinymce+bug+group:sage-devel#c2477e1bdba68028 and http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/msg/e2eb3f848a21faa3

• Trivial to set implicit multiplication option for the notebook. On a per worksheet basis with a user default. Same for typeset option.
• Reorganize the notebook help page.
• Automatically have worksheets save their state and restore when started later.
• Update the titlebar from the notebook.
• Auto-updating interacts.

• Whoosh full-text search (codenode-devel).

• Keith Lang's Top 10 UI Myths.

• Chat system for students/users - Google gadget?

• Implement %timeit block in notebook.

• Worksheet tags. (Brian Granger)

• Embed cells, including interacts, in other web pages.
• Prevent text movement by a pixel on cell frame focus. (Ondrej)
• Completions link for iphone.

• Notebook input bug - #6729.

• Python debugger in the notebook.
• Make it possible to delete published worksheets.
• Slideshow mode.
• Interactively zoom, pan, and annotate plots.

• Powerful editor with command-line history, syntax highlighting, context-sensitive completions, etc. - BeSpin.

• Syntax highlighting for published worksheets - pygmentize.

• Fix MoinMoin.

• Update some output cells after the new output arrives. For example, smoothly update Jmol via its JS interface.

• Publishing notebook pages to selected users or groups.

• GUI plugins for math input.

• Vector graphics editing - SVG-edit.

• Account tokens:

A preliminary patch for this is available at
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst/sage/account_tokens.patch . It is a
patch against 4.1.1 with tickets 4552
('trac_4552-notebook_account_email.patch'), 6843, 6856 applied.

(TODO: add doctests, implement token-generation page to the interface added by
ticket 4135, allow enabling/disabling the token feature from that page too.)

• The 'forgot password' feature (enabled by enabling the 'email' setting of the notebook) currently allows anyone to reset the password of anyone they know the email address of, since it currently directly resets the password and mails the new password to the email address associated with the account. It would probably be better to instead generate a second password for the account, that would only become permanent once it has been used once. Or, alternatively, to email a link with a secure token to a password-change-page.

Build / Test

• Notebook testing infrastructure - automated, cross-browser and platform, focused on functionality, consistency, concurrency, and scalability - Selenium, Testled, WebDriver. For example, execute 10 sessions of virtual calculus students in a loop.

• Make it so Sage binaries don't use SSE3, etc. -- make them FAT!
• Windows build farm.
• Sagelite - separate the current notebook from Sage. Windows port.
• Windows port.

• VirtualBox Sage.

• andLinux Sage.
• Improve documentation/testing and refactor code.
• Upgrade Sage for 66-bit processors.