On 20 Feb 2009, at 8:14 PM, Louis-Jean Teitelbaum wrote: > > Le 20 févr. 09 à 16:42, Michael McCracken a écrit : > >>> The Web Group is nice, but (a) does not fit naturally into many >>> people's workflow, and (b) does not allow for adding importers >>> without >>> altering the BibDesk source code. >> >> If we solve (b), does (a) go away? Web group works well enough for me >> that I now start in BibDesk when I start looking for a reference. >> Maybe the problem is just that it isn't polished enough yet to get >> people to change habits? >> >> Or am I being naive and no one will ever really switch from the >> browser? > > Speaking of BibDesk's browser, a few issues would make it easier to > integrate it into my workflow. This is an aside to the main importers > discussion, but I would actually change my habits if the web group > becomes more "polished". Those are just suggestions based on my > particular usage patterns. > > First, on some sites, it is cumbersome to import multiple entries. On > a site like the ACM library, import buttons in BibDesk appear on > individual publications' pages, or inside what they call "Binders". > They don't appear for search results or proceedings tables of > contents.
That's just a question on what's available on the pages, as well as the strength of the importers. Perhaps customizable importers could make this better, though it probably would not really work to replace importers. > I can think of three ways to alleviate this issue : tabbed browsing, a > more efficient "Back/Forward" cache (I don't know if there's any right > now), There are history buttons in the web group. "Tabbed browsing" would basically be multiple web groups. That's possible, but would make the implementation a lot more complex. > or a "don't load this page but show me the publication that it > links to" feature. Such a a feature (e.g. command-click on a link, and > instead of loading the page, BD tries to scrape the citations it > contains) would go well with the importer idea discussed in the > thread. > No, that would be just the weak part I talked about. The point about the web group is that it shows you the items in the current view that you than can easily inspect and import. It would also be wrong (apart from being extremely error-prone and complex) to show the items for some other page. > Second, I come across lots of sites that provide citations through RIS > files (and not bib content). It would be nice if BibDesk could > download these files and either open them, or display the contained > data in the publications pane of the web group. This would make a site > such as hcibib.org directly usable inside BibDesk. In principle it is possible to write importers for those, and in fact we already do for some. BD already understands formats like RIS. So it could be possible for plugins to return, say, RIS instead of bibtex. > Third, and less related, I often have to clean up publications I add > through the web group (normalize the cite-key, add keywords, etc.), > but in order to do so, I have to switch to the Last imported group. I > would find it more intuitive if I could make changes directly in the > web view, before importing the publication. I guess the rationale for > those items being read-only is that, well, they are on the web and not > on my drive, but maybe this list could become of a staging area before > the importation. > > Cheers, > > Louis-Jean Teitelbaum > TELECOM ParisTech It's fragile, because reloading the page will replace those modified items. It also is a problem from the point of view of implementation, because editing and display updating is very complex and needs to be very efficient (we've spend an enormous amount of time on this just without these considerations, it's a far from trivial problem). Christiaan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
