UI Improvements?

dirgles
First off, great app!! You've done an excellent job.
I'm just leaving this post because there are a couple of things that I think could be improved as I build up my db. [apologies if some of these have already come up]

1) If I'm editing the title field and I then I want to edit another field, so I click on it. All that happens in the title field loses focus, shrinks, then I have to find the field I just clicked on... again... then click on it... again. It's all a bit clunky. If I'm editing one field and I click on another, it should just go straight into "edit mode" on this second field. Hope my description makes sense.

2) Some papers have many authors, so it's a bit of a pain to always have to switch between the keyboard and the mouse to enter them all (to add extra authors).

3) As I'm entering data I'm often switching between Zotero and Acrobat (via ALT-TAB). If I'm in the middle of writing the title, for example, every time I do this I lose my position in the edit box so I have to go back to the mouse to click on the appropriate field and then get the cursor back to the end of the field. This is a also a bit of a pain. Basically, we need to minimize the need to use the mouse when entering data.

Thanks!

Dylan
  • dstillman
    1) If I'm editing the title field and I then I want to edit another field, so I click on it. All that happens in the title field loses focus, shrinks, then I have to find the field I just clicked on
    You can use Tab to go through the fields. Your suggestion is still a good one, and I think was an original goal—it just may be difficult to implement. We'll see what we can do.
    2) Some papers have many authors, so it's a bit of a pain to always have to switch between the keyboard and the mouse to enter them all (to add extra authors).
    You can use Shift-Enter to add a new author from the keyboard.

    Short of a major reworking of the metadata pane, there may not be much we can do about #3 while keeping autosave functionality, but we'll look into it. Thanks.
  • dirgles
    Wow, thanks for the fast reply Dan!

    #1 comes up often because it would mean tabbing quite a bit, so the mouse is a bit faster.

    Thanks for the shortcut tip re. #2!

    It's too bad #3 is tricky because it's probably the most inconvenient of the 3. I'm used to EndNote working that way and it allows me to enter the data rather quickly. At least with Zotero, if the pdf is open in Firefox theoretically you shouldn't have to switch between two apps.

    There were a couple other things I wanted to comment on, but Firefox (ver. 2.0.9) is telling me that Zotero 1.0.1 is incompatible with that ver. So it's disabled and I can try it out to remind myself what they were :( You probably already know about this problem.

    cheers!
  • mark
    Just want to note that I also run into dirges' problem #3 very often.
    Short of a major reworking of the metadata pane, there may not be much we can do about #3 while keeping autosave functionality, but we'll look into it. Thanks.
    What about disabling autosave functionality for single-line fields? (Autosave is most handy anyway for multi-line fields and notes.) Or I would even be willing to disable autosave-while-editing entirely, so that stuff would only be saved when I explicitly say 'loose focus' by clicking somewhere else in the Zotero window (but not by ALT+TABbing to another app). Would something like that be architecturally possible? (A hidden pref perhaps?)
  • dstillman
    I would even be willing to disable autosave-while-editing entirely, so that stuff would only be saved when I explicitly say 'loose focus' by clicking somewhere else in the Zotero window (but not by ALT+TABbing to another app). Would something like that be architecturally possible?
    This is a perfectly reasonable request, but the problem here is that Firefox triggers a "blur" event when switching to another application, which it probably shouldn't (though I suppose you could argue both sides), and Zotero currently saves the field on blur(). It's possible we could manually trigger saving when clicking on various other UI elements in Zotero, but it'd make the code considerably more convoluted than it is now.

    I created a ticket for this, but I don't know when or how it will get addressed. Suggestions welcome.
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