Upgrade StorageChrome Extension Bug
Hey,
I just wanted to share an issue I found while trying to record a tutorial for my students. Very minor use case issue, but annoying till I figured it out.
I recorded one take on how to use the extension, then I wanted to do another take, so I deleted the saved references from Zotero desktop app for a fresh start. Going back to record the next take, I laughed because when I clicked on the Zotero Connector, which should populate the reference within the desktop app, nothing appeared. Once I refreshed the webpage and tried again, all was well.
I will point this out to students as a common issue with a quick fix: just refresh your page and try again. However, I was pissed in the moment, and while I have the patience for little quirks like this, many will not. You guys (Zotero) have to improve the UI experience. I'm an novice developer, so I understand the struggle to a degree, but these days you have no excuse not to make things more intuitive/responsive. The UI for Word doc citations took a few tries to understand and was not intuitive.
My 2 cents. Thanks.
I just wanted to share an issue I found while trying to record a tutorial for my students. Very minor use case issue, but annoying till I figured it out.
I recorded one take on how to use the extension, then I wanted to do another take, so I deleted the saved references from Zotero desktop app for a fresh start. Going back to record the next take, I laughed because when I clicked on the Zotero Connector, which should populate the reference within the desktop app, nothing appeared. Once I refreshed the webpage and tried again, all was well.
I will point this out to students as a common issue with a quick fix: just refresh your page and try again. However, I was pissed in the moment, and while I have the patience for little quirks like this, many will not. You guys (Zotero) have to improve the UI experience. I'm an novice developer, so I understand the struggle to a degree, but these days you have no excuse not to make things more intuitive/responsive. The UI for Word doc citations took a few tries to understand and was not intuitive.
My 2 cents. Thanks.
First, this isn't a "common issue" — it's obviously a rare edge case that you hit because you were recording a video and deleted an item before saving it again. There'd be no reason to do that in normal use, so I have no idea why you're adopting this aggrieved tone ("pissed in the moment", "You guys have to improve the UI experience", "no excuse not to make things more intuitive") for something you yourself say is "very minor". There's no reason this would even be worth mentioning to your students, who obviously won't be deleting items and then immediately resaving them from the same page without reloading. It's just a non-issue.
In any case, this is barely even a bug. After you save an item, clicking the save button again doesn't save another copy, by design, since that would cause people to create duplicates all the time — it just reopens the save popup to let you make further changes to the target collection and tags. If you go out of your way to switch to Zotero and delete the item, and then switch back to your browser and click the save button again, the code currently just skips that item, which might be one of multiple items saved, and the desired behavior there isn't even clear — you might have deleted a single item but want to move the others to a different collection. But if it's a single item and it was deleted, the item should probably be resaved (or removed from the trash). I'll create a ticket for that, but the idea that this is something worth being "pissed" about is pretty bizarre.
An upcoming Zotero Connector update will also provide a way to delete a saved item from the save popup, and in that case, a second click on the save button will obviously save it again.
In the future, if you'd like to report something here, please just report it and skip the unnecessary commentary.