Upgrade StorageNotes, Attachments Tabs Disappear in 2.0b7
I just upgraded to 2.0b7 (15 Sep 2009 1AM).
The Notes and Attachments Tabs have completely disappeared.
The Notes and Attachments Tabs have completely disappeared.
I sense a bias against attachments on the part of some designers. While a citation is the key data entity, a PDF is the key physical entity. Users who maintain very large collections of PDFs need features and tools which approach the work from that direction as well.
You can make an argument as to the best way to access attachments and notes, but the tabs were—by definition—redundant, as they provided no functionality that's not provided elsewhere in the interface. See the previous discussion on this for the various reasons this change was made.
Note that double-clicking on an item in the center pane should generally open the associated PDF automatically, though it may not do that in all cases currently.
I'm no designer, but I think sometimes redundancy is a good thing, and would be happy to have the notes tab returned. Reading the list of notes was more pleasant there, as it didn't have the distracting frame of other collection items above and below. Minor quirks, perhaps, but one that made navigating notes both within a single item and across several items in a collection much quicker and easier.
I think previously the right-hand pane was the "work within item" pane, now its the "related information" pane, while the middle pane, which was largely about item summary and navigation, has taken on the position of "work within item" without adapting its layout or presentation to suit the job better. The older organisation felt more natural to me, with the panes having a kind of "zoom" or increasing resolution left to right.
At the very least, I'd like to see a generic "Add note" button added as has been suggested by others, somewhere to the left of the sync button perhaps?
Just my 2c. Other than that, I'm not sure if I've sent a proper piece of fan mail to all the developers before now - Zotero is by far the most useful and most delightful piece of software I've ever put use as an academic. Thank you very much for all of the work on it.
We debated (and are still considering) moving the note and new attachment buttons to the left side of the right pane toolbar. The downside is that Add Standalone Note would make less sense there. However, the other five options would make somewhat more sense, since they're context-specific.
Ah. Thanks for pointing that out. Single click doesn't work for me though. Linux, Firefox 3.5.3 - clicking on the "New Note" button with an item selected in the middle pane produces the New Note menu rather than a child note in the selected item.
I think I'd still prefer a return of the notes tab, but obviously that's just one vote.
Thanks.
Fair enough. Cheers.
Thanks!
delete: right click - delete selected item from library
Adding notes in the update isn't that bad, but recalling the notes has become a pain.
For my relatively large collections (>60) I found it very convenient to find the relevant collection in the left panel, scan the title in the middle panel, single click and see the notes on the right panel without cluttering up the middle pane. I use the notes function to quickly remind me what the source says, or more importantly, what I can say because of the source. When citing the source in a document I can scan titles and quickly find the source backing up my statement. Now there's no convenient way to do that. I would need to click on the arrow to open up all the sources (separately!) and navigate through the mess of a middle panel.
Why not make make the right panel more customizable and add the ability to right click to remove or display tabs at the users discretion?
Thanks to everyone who helped so far to develop this great application.
"When citing the source in a document I can scan titles and quickly find the source backing up my statement."
With the note tab you could keep the note panel open on the right and just go from item to item in the middle. That seems to make a lot of sense to me as a desirable feature.
Without taking away from that, the little known feature that allows you to collapse and expand attachments using + and - on the keyboard will - while not as convenient as what jfiedler describes above - greatly facilitate your handling of notes and attachments in general.
Oh, and I'm using Firefox 3.5.3 on a MacBook. Thanks!
I'm not convinced, given the new toolbar buttons and context-menu options, that there's any win for the tabs for input.
I can see some value in scanning down the list and looking in the right-hand pane, but I'd be interested to hear how this differs substantially from hitting + in the middle pane and scrolling down the expanded list, which gives you more vertical space to see more notes at once (with - to collapse all).
But assuming such a case could be made for notes, the need to be able to scan attachments in that way seems more questionable. The large majority of items have only one or two attachments, and there's not usually any doubt about what the attachments are—they're generally the PDF or HTML snapshot that accompanies the parent item—and so scanning down the list doesn't seem very useful, particularly when you can double-click an item in the middle pane to automatically open the PDF or snapshot (which now works better in 2.0b7.1).
The scrolling of notes though I can see: You have the nice, ordered list of your titles in the middle - easy to overview etc. and just scroll it down one by one looking at the notes. Now, you have to tab the down arrow two or three times (but it depends), the panel on the right is always changing, and you see fewer items at once, because they are all expanded.
On the notes front though, it's all about getting at the information quickly and clearly. Thanks to jfiedler for making the point clearly (I was trying to say a similar thing when talking about "navigation" before).
There was just something much neater about having a nice clear list of notes. The middle pane is a tad cluttered, and maybe it's just me but the columns within the pane don't help. I have "Title", "Creator" and sometimes "Year" columns active, which can crush the notes list into an even smaller space, making it trickier to scan through them.
That said, maybe after a few weeks of it I'll get use to it.
I would wonder about the "tags" and "related" tabs though. Are they necessary? I wouldn't have more than a few tags or related links on most of my items, and if they were only accessible via the middle pane I wouldn't be whinging at all. Maybe take notes out of the middle pane entirely, and move tags and related in there instead (maybe colour them or format them differently to distinguish the two) and leave the right pane for info, notes and whatever else is coming down the line?
Maybe leave tags in the right pane but move related into the middle pane as an expandable set of links?
I haven't really thought this through, so it might make no sense whatsoever...
Thus why not have only two tabs. One info, and the other one containing a list of tags, notes, attachments and related. Tags could be separated by commas rather than each tag on a line. This would give a much quicker overview. It would allow to directly view all these items without clicking, simply by scrolling down the list.
I also preferred the one click method of adding a note to an item that I'm working with - the new standalone/child button is cumbersome and could lead to some horrible mistakes if, say, you were working with a large number of files, accidentally created a standalone note and subsequently found it impossible to find the correct parent. (It makes sense IMO to separate buttons that add things to the library and buttons that add things to items.)
I found the notes pane quite useful for scanning through using the down arrow key on the keyboard. My notes often take the form of short sentences summarising what the source tells me (i.e. what I can cite it in support of) and the old system allowed me to generate a "procession" of the weight of evidence I could call on in a particular topic, without any extraneous information getting in the way (such as attachments - which can be quite numerous, and therefore distracting, in the biological sciences*).
My main concern is that having to read everything from the centre pane results in a significantly more cluttered and less elegant user experience when reviewing items.
* E.g. supplementary online text, timelapse movies, high resolution images, repository entries for gene constructs/protein structures and additional reference lists.
Also, Combining the 'Tags' and 'Related' panes may be a good idea, depending on how the hierarchical relations interface is going to work out. As others above, I find that both tags and related items rarely exceed 5 items.
Yes, expanding all items by clicking + , results in a cluttered view. And the most of the subitems are attached PDFs and screenshots - seeing them there conveys little additional information.
But what if you add another shortcut which would expand notes only? As in the expanded view the beginning of every note is shown, you already know what it's about. And if you click onto it - you immediately see the full note text in the right pane.