Bug or feature?

Ed Hagen

Some time elapsed between reading about and installing Zotero, and actually trying to use it for real-world tasks. During the interim, I forgot about the icon in the address bar, and so I was adding items using the 'Create New Item from Current Page' in the Zotero pane tool bar. By using the latter button, however, none of the bibliographic info on the page (e.g., a PubMed search) was entered. I began to wonder why I had thought Zotero was such a great tool (an opinion I've now returned to).

OK, so this was my problem, and the behaviors are correctly described in the documentation, but, for new (or particularly dense) users, should the toolbar in the Zotero pane have a button that duplicates the functionality of the address bar button? Should the 'Create New Item from Current Page' button have the same functionality as the address bar button? I imagine you want Zotero users to discover (or rediscover) one of its most valuable features are easily as possible.

dancohen

We're glad you're finding the program helpful, Ed, and we're also about to release a number of new screencasts (videos) to show off some of Zotero's best features.

The slight problem with the solution you propose is that there are some web pages, e.g., a page on Amazon.com showing a book, for which a user might want to grab the book itself (using the icon in the address bar), or the web page itself (using the "New Item" button in the pane), or even a snapshot (using the camera icon). The latter two would save ephemera on the page like reviews, while using the book icon would just grab the citation information for use in bibliographies, footnotes, etc.

Ed Hagen

Dan, thanks for responding. A few minor suggestions (just my two cents, of course):

First, how about moving discussion of what is rightly referred to as "Perhaps the most important feature of Zotero" from the end of the Quick Start Guide up towards the front?

Second, the philosophy of the Zotero pane toolbar seems to be to break out a lot of the "content creation" functionality of Zotero into separate buttons. Could another button, with the address bar icon functionality, be added to the toolbar, perhaps labeled something like "Save citation for current page" (and only active when Zotero senses such info)?

(To expand a bit on my failure, I think it stemmed from my assumption that all the Zotero functionality could be found within what I perceived to be the Zotero "app" i.e., the three large panes. Thus it was a bit surprising to find the most powerful functionality only up in the address bar.)

Third, many users might want the other functionality (saving links, snapshots, etc.) available in the address bar, especially if they are not academics. Would it be useful to add options to choose which function, or combination of functions, is available in the address bar?

I realize you're very close to the final release for 1.0, so these are simply suggestions to ponder for 1.1 and beyond.