Upgrade StorageDecent Toolbar with more information
It would surely help with convenience to have a proper toolbar in Zotero, be it standalone or FF plugin.
I find myself clicking the options (ie under the cogwheel or under the plus sign, can't remember) ALL THE TIME for adjustments.
At the same time i have this vast grey bar at the top of Zotero with nothing in there.
Why not turn menu entries of the options to entries in the toolbar? And so with all the other commands hiding?
It would also be good to be able to choose between displaying icons only and icons + text (compare to FF or TB). As I said, icons alone may not be particularly informative.
I find myself clicking the options (ie under the cogwheel or under the plus sign, can't remember) ALL THE TIME for adjustments.
At the same time i have this vast grey bar at the top of Zotero with nothing in there.
Why not turn menu entries of the options to entries in the toolbar? And so with all the other commands hiding?
It would also be good to be able to choose between displaying icons only and icons + text (compare to FF or TB). As I said, icons alone may not be particularly informative.
Also, on many people's screens, the Zotero toolbar does not have a huge amount of free space, so we can't just fill it with lots more stuff (and that would be awful for usability anyway—there's a cost to just adding things). We could allow a customizable toolbar, but that's a separate issue.
I have the entries New group and New collection in the toolbar which I'd love to get rid of as I have never ever used them.
I am using the options dialogue all the time but to get to it I have to go cogwheel --> options --> entry. A painful process. These entries should all go into the toolbar afaiac.
In addition, half of the other cogwheel entries appear under "Tools". I see no logic there.
I think most people will have some space left, and making it customisable would be good for them.
For beginners, toolbar entries with text are good to learn.
A choice between big and small icons could also come handy for some people.
Cf. https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/3.0/chrome/locale/en-US/zotero/standalone.dtd#L58 ]
In my Zotero there is: General, Sync, Search, Export, Cite, Shortcuts and Advanced. These are the commands I keep using.
In order for this to be helpful you need to give us an idea what you're actually doing that requires you to access the preferences frequently.
Preferences aren't meant to be regularly used. If there's a particular setting that many people need to change frequently, it should just be accessible in some other way. (I think the default Quick Copy setting is a good candidate.)
BTW, Dan, I had no answer in this thread. More generally, the strings on transifex have not been updated.
Well, being rather new to Zotero, I have to make adjustments and changes to Zotero all the time so this is why i keep tinkering with the prefs.
I do not use New Collection, New Group, the identifier or the add link button.
I spend most Zotero Time with the Citation Styles etc.
Obviously in terms of toolbar design, it doesn't make much sense to adjust the design with people who're experimenting in mind - it needs to be as efficient as possible for regular users and intuitive for beginners. And most beginning users shouldn't really have to adjust much - the defaults are sensibly chosen.
Your questions brought out a side-dialog about the names attached to commands across operating systems and languages. You can safely ignore that until you become more familiar with Zotero. (These messages were more about other threads and discussions than answers to _your_ questions.)
I am quite interested in what you are trying to accomplish by tinkering with the prefs. In general those can be set once and then left alone unless you have some special need to make a change.
If the styles that are standard to the program are missing a style or styles that you need, you can easily add other styles from the repository. Sebastian (adamsmith) was alerting you to a relatively new online utility that makes it easier to create new styles. You may or may not need to create a special purpose style -- there are a zillion styles in the repository.
Please describe how you most use Zotero... capturing citations from publisher websites? hand-entering citation records? using Zotero to insert references into a manuscript and formatting the in-text marks and reference list to conform to a publisher's requirements? something else?
Also, if you have come to Zotero from some other bibliographic management software, it would be helpful if you would tell us what you have had experience with.
If you describe what you are doing, I'm sure that someone here can help you to do it more efficiently (without needing to frequently access the preferences).
thanks for your inquiry. I still find myself adjusting to various ways of referencing. I have abandoned the idea to create a citation style which I, personally, prefer as I will have to use another one anyway (probably APA). As it happened I just had to do a lot of adjustments as I was installing Zotero Addin with Firefox at work, Zotero Standalone at home where I usually use Opera and where I just moved from XP to Win 7. Generally this meant a lot of installing and reinstalling. Eg I was trying to get rid of the spelling check for German notes, see here http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/19771/workaround-to-disable-spell-checker/.
Currently I am having some trouble adjusting the APA style. On the other hand, it is nothing to hurry with as my paper will not be due this year.
I mostly create entries through OPACs whenever this is possible (see discussion here http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10944/article-import-from-gvk-gbv-union-catalogue-not-working/#Item_11)
I have moved to Zotero from LitLink (last version was 4.0 I think). The main reason for it was Zotero's integration with word processing, a killer feature I think! Also, creating entries from OPACs is generally working well.
What I miss - in contrast to LitLink - is the possibility to create subentries (ie single articles) for one volume. LitLink had this info box "other articles from this volume", which also made it easy to create new respective entries.
One reason for my original post here was the fact that there seemed to be so much space available on the toolbar.
cu
this looks awesome! I must have a look at it once I settle to finalise my paper. Actually I am a bit scared to spend too much time on 'bibliographing' and too little on my actual paper...