On 21 Dec 2007, at 10:15 PM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote: > > 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. >
Why should this be a table? E.g. what would the selection mean? Also then you'll have display problems because of the row height. If you have a single text view the textview gives the an automatic layout of the items. >> 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... > I do think sorting is useful. But probably only a few. I'm not sure if not having the table with customizable columns is a good idea. If we create a citation column as Adam suggests the user could choose for himself, and also keep a few columns for sorting. >> 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 Though the template editor is mainly useful for citation templates. It is less useful for preview templates. Rich text is not as easy, as well as line breaks. Custom conditionals and lists (e.g. lists of fields) are not supported. Christiaan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
