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.

• reST back ticks versus $ - Patch or extend Sphinx.

• Fix sagenb.org so docstrings look right (Sphinx).
• 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.

  2. %rest in cells, and get rest output.

• Document pexpect interface for users.

Notebook

Admin

• Fix the major bugs and issues with the current notebook that make it difficult to deploy (e.g., account management).

• Add a textcha question for notebook signup. How about 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)

Users

• 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?

• 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 (search in codenode archives for discussion).

• Keith Lang's Top 10 UI Myths.

• Chat system for students/users. Is there a Google gadget for this?
• Implement %timeit block in notebook.

• Worksheet tags. (Brian Granger)

• Embed interacts in other web pages.
• There are things that I now don't like on the Sage notebook, like that if I click on a cell, the frame gets focused (that's ok), but the text moves by one pixel. I hate that. My javascript version doesn't do that, at least on firefox. In fact, it's just a CSS styles issue, so it's easy to fix -- but I wasn't sure if it's just on my firefox, or oeverywhere. (ONDREJ)
• Completions link for iphone.

• Notebook input bug #6729.

• Debugger in the notebook. Python.
• Make it possible to delete published worksheets.
• Slideshow mode.
• In-browser zoom-pan-annotate of Sage plots.

• What I mean is that the chance to access at the same time an history powered command line, and a powerful editor (with code completion, tabs, colors, etc.., which looks pretty standard - to not say minimal - in these modern times) looks pretty comfortable to me, but I'll be happy to listen to other comments. I've already heard talking about BeSpin ( https://bespin.mozilla.com/ ) in this list, right? Can't we have something similar?

• Fix MoinMoin.

• Publishing notebook pages to selected users or groups (to make this effective, groups of users probably needs to be implemented as well).

• GUI plugins for inputing mathematics. See the thread http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mathematics.sage.devel/27294/

• SVG editing: http://code.google.com/p/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

• Implement a cross-browser web-application automated testing infrastructure based on webdriver http://code.google.com/p/webdriver/ for the notebook, focused on functionality, consistency, concurrency, and scalability. For example, execute 10 sessions of virtual calculus students in a loop.

• http://testled.com/

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

• VirtualBox Sage.

• andLinux Sage.
• Improve documentation/testing and refactor code.