TreeProjects - July 2013

Posted by 22111
Jul 28, 2013 at 11:22 PM

Thank you very much for considering this very important point.

It goes without saying that we are speaking here of contents of the database, not of linked data: Here, the standard set by other programs like UR, MI, and so on is indeed to first press enter if you want those external files to be displayed - with the exception of pictures, though: As in UR and MI, they should be “immediately” displayed, without having to press enter. UR, in particular, does this extraordinarily well, with automatically launching an internal picture viewer, without the user being aware that the background is not the ordinary editor he looks at for non-picture content, and the internal viewer functions sufficiently fast in order to make display of text, rtf and pictures, in any order, a flawless “browsing” experience.

As for stripping the screen from unwanted toolbars, coding the necessary option for this is extremely easy, and many people for example use just one standard font, perhaps Arial 10 point or something, and then use keyboard shortcuts in order to apply bolding, italicising, and so on, so they don’t need formatting toolbars but love to have their screen as neat as possible.

With regards to the tree and the “tree search result” panes, I wrote my remarks from my notes done some/many months ago, without my memory recalling the details, but I firmly remember that the behavior of these two panes was unintuitive at the time, meaning the wrong pane had focus, in order to proceed from there; you might have changed this in the meanwhile, even.

But please consider three aspects, from a “workflow” point of view:

- When the results for this particular search are more than one item, the additional pane is really useful, but the focus should be switch to the additional pane since then you will choose “from there”. Immediately afterwards, though, in most cases, you will want to have focus again in the tree, and to have this item to be selected within the tree (!) - why? Because, if you work on that item chosen within the results pane, you will want to see your current item within its (tree) context!

- In rare cases, you will want to work on all (!) the finds, one after another, for example in my above example of a group of customers. Here - and here only -, the user would appreciate the tab to switch focus not between text/content and tree again, as elsewhere, but to switch between content and results pane, in order to select the next find there. This could perhaps be realized with a toggle, or with another special command. If I remember well, there were not special keyboard shortcuts for switching to content, to tree, and to results pane (I might be wrong here), but just one switch-around command you had to trigger several times, in case, which is not a good idea. Anyway, and also when you switch between content and results, for every such result selection, the tree should be updated in order to show the item in question in its context, too.

- But whenever the result of your special search is just one item, it is devoid of interest to show it within the/a special pane: In this case, just select it in within the tree (and even hide the result pane, when it had been shown for several results before this current search) - the coding of such differentiation between the cases “more than one tree search result” vs. “just one tree search result” would be very easy, but would have a very elegant effect.

On bits, I see TP is on offer there, today. There, you say (again) you want have TP “as simple as possible” - please, don’t say that (too often): It could be receoved as a thread that you would be unwilling to develop it beyond some minimum standards, which would be an absolute pity. Many outliner users want an elegant, smooth, uncomplicated UI, but powerful functionality nethertheless.

UR is bad on the first aspect, MI traditionally lacked some of the second, but is catching up, and there is certainly room for some technically not-too-basic TP.

My warmest wishes for your doing good business on bits, today!