On Friday, December 21, 2007, at 11:59AM, "Michael McCracken" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >On Dec 21, 2007 10:47 AM, Alexander H. Montgomery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I think that the current setup is probably optimal; for those who wish >> to view their papers, the Preview pane can be set to "linked >> file" (perhaps there should be a way of selecting which linked file is >> displayed?), while the existing thumbnails should be good enough to >> identify which of several items is the one that you want to look at. >> >> Another option would be to just have an optional setting to put the >> bottom pane on the right-hand-side for those of us with very wide >> monitors; some people prefer Mail to be in a three-pane side-by-side >> format, this might benefit as well. > >This is interesting - I bet almost everyone with a recent mac or LCD >screen has a wide format monitor, so how can we improve the layout for >that case?
Right! My 3 year old PowerBook has a wide screen, but I think BD is still oriented towards a square screen. >Although I like having lots of columns of info in BibDesk, the >vertically stacked master-detail view has always seemed cramped, and >making the window wider doesn't improve it much. > >I liked the mockup Adam showed - I do think that the format of >references in papers is easier to read than single line tableview >rows. I don't think we'd want two views of the table selection, though >- the new right-side summary view in his mockup seemed like another >table view to me. That's exactly what it was :). I agree that having two table views of the same information is weird, and what I'm looking for could also be solved by having a "citation" column in the main table that showed a formatted reference. If that were available, I'd close the bottom preview pane and dedicate it to annote/abstract. >However, in some ways, that summary view actually >seems like a better 'main view' than the table view... > >If we had a three-column layout, the extra vertical pixels we buy in >the middle column could be spent on a table view with one column but >>1 line(s) of text per item row, something like the right side of >Adam's mockup, which I liked. The problem I see is that it's not sortable. 99% of what I've done with sorting I could also do with groups/search, so maybe I need to adjust my old habits. OTOH, sorting by year or by index is pretty useful, for instance. I guess we could use a popup table header allowing you to choose the sort criteria, but that might not be very discoverable. Just think of all the code we could remove if we went to a single table column... >Of course, nobody's going to agree on what data goes in that wide >tableview so it'd have to be templated, and that's plenty of work (or >is it?) Christiaan has done some stellar work on making templates editable by mere mortals, and they're also extremely flexible. Since you can ask a BibItem for a templated attributed string, I'd guess that the hard work is done. -- adam ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
