view collection in sidebar

joewalp
With recent popularity of widescreen displays, many users have plenty of horizontal real estate. On displays of this sort, it's convenient for an index of reference materials to appear in the sidebar rather than in a pane beneath the tabbrowser. This is the format chosen by the Firefox 2.0 History and the ScrapBook extension.

I propose for an item in the Collections list to have a 'View in sidebar' item on its context menu.

Ideally, dragging a tab of the tabbrowser and hovering over the Zotero toolbaritem should open the sidebar, and the sidebar should list documents from the most recently selected collection. Then the user could drag+hover+drop to create a snapshot.
  • Mander
    I would like this, too, and/or the ability to open Zotero in its own tab.

    Unless I'm missing something?
  • joewalp
    edited September 1, 2007
    I've begun implementing this. Below is a link to a development shapshot. It's built atop a checkout from the svn repository a few days ago.

    Note that this does include a DB schema change, so if you want to play with it, you should do so in a new Firefox profile.

    Changes include:
    1. Adds a sidebar
    2. Adds an item to the pane toolbar to toggle the sidebar
    3. Adds a context menu item to the items pane to open the sidebar
    4. Downloads and displays the favicon for snapshots
    5. Adds a toolbar button to toggle the sidebar (Note that I'm aware that the icon is no good. See Todo item 6.)
    6. Moves the editing toolbar below the tabbrowser

    Todo:
    1. Autocomplete with previously entered search terms in the search fields
    2. Move the search field below the toolbar in the sidebar, and add several buttons (editing, creation, etc.) to the sidebar.
    3. Hover on buttons opens pane or sidebar
    4. Make favicons optional in either the pane view or the sidebar view
    5. Test drag-and-drop items between windows (I may have broken this.)
    6. Convince someone to make a better icon (with active, hover, 16px, 24px, etc versions) for the toggle sidebar toolbar button.

    After the first five of those todo items are complete, I'll submit a patch.


    The preview is here:
    https://filer.case.edu/jcw10/zotero/zotero-sidebar-2007-09-01-a.xpi


    BTW, I'm lead developer for the Firefox version of the StumbleUpon Toolbar extension. Contact me here: joe stumbleupon.com or joewalp yahoo.com
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