Upgrade StorageImprove capture functionality and in-page highlights & markup
The only thing preventing me from switching from Scrapbook to Zotero is its limited capture ability and poor in-situ highlights and markup.
For Zotero to become my primary research tool the following issues will need to be resolved:
1. When "Saving Snapshot" there needs to be a way to capture links to images, sound (mp3, wav, ram, wma), movies (mpgs, avis, mov's, wmvs), archives (zip, lzh, rar, jar, xpi), and also custom formats.
2. There also needs to be a way to "spider" or do an "in-depth" capture grabbing several link levels below the current page. For example ...
Say the current page is:
Now lets say I want to capture 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5. To do this I would need a mechanism (like the one in Scrapbook) that asks for the depth to follow (1). Then afterwards the application would analyze the link structure, present the user with the option to choose which to download and also which to ignore based on depth chosen.
To emulate this I currently go to a page take a snapshot, then I click on each image link, take a snapshot of that and stick the resulting item beneath the original item. This is extremely time consuming. It also means that rather than being able to just click the link in-page from the original snapshot (assuming the original link to the image is dead) I now have to dig through the list of items under the original and find the correct picture.
3. There's no way to modify a web-page so it just contains the relevant text from an article (ie/ Scrapbooks DOM eraser, remove selection, etc ... to get rid of advertisements, excessive menus, etc)
4. There's no sticky note annotations even though the tour suggests such a mechanism exists (http://www.zotero.org/videos/tour/zotero_tour.htm). I tried using 'Add selection to Zotero Note' and 'Create Zotero Item and Note from Selection' and neither showed an in-page highlight.
And there are several other things that bother me, but not nearly as big as the issues listed above:
5. No main context menu with - Capture Selection & Capture Page & Bookmark /w Zotero
6. Double clicking on an item in the center column (where all the data lives) doesn't take the user to the original page. To do this I have to click on the snapshot under the main item and *then* I click the link attached to the snapshot to navigate to the original web-page. There should be a default link, even though any given item may have many links. This should default to the original source and be modifiable through the plugin front-end.
Other small recommendations ...
7. If you plan to make a collaboration tool please make sure to leverage other sites like Diigo and clipmarks (or at least import and export to them).
And that's really it.
It's great that Zotero has the concept that an item can exist in numerous locations, automatically fetches bibliographic information, supports tags, links to files on disk, has related items, but that's just the reference piece of the puzzle. Having better capture features means there's more content to search against. Having in-page annotation & markup means more fluid / dynamic research and study. Please, bridge the gap! I want more than just a file-fetching program (Scrapbook) and Zotero provides that, but still it's more time consuming to manually save everything out by hand than it is to manually write the bibliographic information. Making it unfortunately all to easy to overlook Zotero. I implore you add annotation / markup and better capture features - the world is dying for such a tool. :)
-Dustin
For Zotero to become my primary research tool the following issues will need to be resolved:
1. When "Saving Snapshot" there needs to be a way to capture links to images, sound (mp3, wav, ram, wma), movies (mpgs, avis, mov's, wmvs), archives (zip, lzh, rar, jar, xpi), and also custom formats.
2. There also needs to be a way to "spider" or do an "in-depth" capture grabbing several link levels below the current page. For example ...
Say the current page is:
| 1. htm and it has links to | ||
| 2. htm | ||
| 2a.htm | ||
| 3.htm | ||
| 3a.htm | ||
| 4.htm | ||
| 4a.htm | ||
| 5.htm | ||
| 6.htm | ||
| Main.htm | ||
| Maina.htm | ||
Now lets say I want to capture 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5. To do this I would need a mechanism (like the one in Scrapbook) that asks for the depth to follow (1). Then afterwards the application would analyze the link structure, present the user with the option to choose which to download and also which to ignore based on depth chosen.
To emulate this I currently go to a page take a snapshot, then I click on each image link, take a snapshot of that and stick the resulting item beneath the original item. This is extremely time consuming. It also means that rather than being able to just click the link in-page from the original snapshot (assuming the original link to the image is dead) I now have to dig through the list of items under the original and find the correct picture.
3. There's no way to modify a web-page so it just contains the relevant text from an article (ie/ Scrapbooks DOM eraser, remove selection, etc ... to get rid of advertisements, excessive menus, etc)
4. There's no sticky note annotations even though the tour suggests such a mechanism exists (http://www.zotero.org/videos/tour/zotero_tour.htm). I tried using 'Add selection to Zotero Note' and 'Create Zotero Item and Note from Selection' and neither showed an in-page highlight.
And there are several other things that bother me, but not nearly as big as the issues listed above:
5. No main context menu with - Capture Selection & Capture Page & Bookmark /w Zotero
6. Double clicking on an item in the center column (where all the data lives) doesn't take the user to the original page. To do this I have to click on the snapshot under the main item and *then* I click the link attached to the snapshot to navigate to the original web-page. There should be a default link, even though any given item may have many links. This should default to the original source and be modifiable through the plugin front-end.
Other small recommendations ...
7. If you plan to make a collaboration tool please make sure to leverage other sites like Diigo and clipmarks (or at least import and export to them).
And that's really it.
It's great that Zotero has the concept that an item can exist in numerous locations, automatically fetches bibliographic information, supports tags, links to files on disk, has related items, but that's just the reference piece of the puzzle. Having better capture features means there's more content to search against. Having in-page annotation & markup means more fluid / dynamic research and study. Please, bridge the gap! I want more than just a file-fetching program (Scrapbook) and Zotero provides that, but still it's more time consuming to manually save everything out by hand than it is to manually write the bibliographic information. Making it unfortunately all to easy to overlook Zotero. I implore you add annotation / markup and better capture features - the world is dying for such a tool. :)
-Dustin
-
XtraemeWoops - please move this to 'Feature Requests' :)