Feature Request (Improvement/Modification to Attachment Flow)

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Najeeb
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2019 7:53 pm

Feature Request (Improvement/Modification to Attachment Flow)

Post by Najeeb »

Dear Jon / Bookends Developers,
I have been using Bookends for over a month and am really happy with it, and it has replaced Endnote / Sente effectively.

I think it would be fabulous if one could also view ones books in a way similar to a program like Delicious Monster. For book lovers who have attached cover art it is a wonderful feature to be able to browse books by cover. At the moment attachment/cover flow, which allows something like this, is a little restricted in that it does not allow one to see the rest of the data (and only limited data from one book at a time) and its slow in its current implementation.

Would it be possible to incorporate a separate view option (lie the screen shot attached). Attachment flow restricts the number of books you can view at a glance and you can't manipulate data while in this view. Plus it's great to be able to make selections of books while viewing their covers. For instance I love making a final selection of books to assign my seminars, or prioritize my readings, by scrolling through the cover art (as if the books were on my table, or I was viewing them on my book shelf.) Its also a fun way to view ones own collection of books.

Screenshot 2019-04-23 15.42.43.jpg
Screenshot 2019-04-23 15.42.43.jpg (113.83 KiB) Viewed 4875 times

I think this will also make Bookends appealing to people who are casual book collectors (its less useful obviously for journal articles) but you could snag the Book collector market (i.e. people who may have used the now defunct Delicious library or those who use Bookpedia or CollectorZ, and especially those who also need their library/database to also function as a bibliographic management tool.)

If this is too much to ask, perhaps it might be possible to
1) allow one to increase the size of the icons in the List view, or at minimum
2) incorporate attachment flow into the Browser (so one can still see affiliated data / groups etc), and
3) make attachment view a little faster, at the moment it seems to take a while to display more than 50 - 100 items.
Jon
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Location: Bethesda, MD
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Re: Feature Request (Improvement/Modification to Attachment Flow)

Post by Jon »

I think some of your idea are interesting, but they really aren't in the realm of reference management. You rightly point out that this is intended for book collections and name appropriate apps (there's also the freeware Books).We don't compete in that market for good reason. What we *can* do is try to make it easy to move information back and forth between Bookends and book collection-apps. If you have a book collection app and find you can't migrate data from it to Bookends, please name it and tell me what export/import options they provide.

As for your specific requests:

1. The attachment face is shown in the one-column view. It's size is limited to the height of the columns, and that is fixed.
2. I don't know what you mean by "browser". To me that means the built-in Bookends web browser, but that doesn't seem to fit here.
3. We use the Mac APIs for attachment flow (if that's what you're asking about), and the image for each PDF has to be fetched from the image on disk. This is always going to be slower than storing and rendering the image from the Bookends database. It's fast enough when displaying a handful, but when you deal with hundreds you notice the lag. But we don't intend to store attachment images in the database.

Jon
Sonny Software
Najeeb
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2019 7:53 pm

Re: Feature Request (Improvement/Modification to Attachment Flow)

Post by Najeeb »

True this is not a requirement for reference management, but I think you already HAVE what most book collection software does, and I thought it might be a relatively simple to add a new view or way of visualizing existing data (of course I don't code, so I don't know how hard/easy such an implementation would be).

Regarding previous points :
1. Will it be possible in a future release to have adjusting column sizes in one-column view (or set options small, medium, large etc)

2. What I means was to have the attachment flow in the browser window

Tanks for responding and considering these suggestions
Attachments
Untitled 2.jpg
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Jon
Site Admin
Posts: 10188
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:27 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD
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Re: Feature Request (Improvement/Modification to Attachment Flow)

Post by Jon »

I don't know, I've never considered either of those. You're actually the first person who has ever told me they use Attachment Flow, so thanks for that. :-)

Jon
Sonny Software
rickl
Posts: 182
Joined: Thu Sep 16, 2004 4:47 am
Location: Japan

Re: Feature Request (Improvement/Modification to Attachment Flow)

Post by rickl »

For what it's worth, something along the lines of what's been suggested here would really interest me. To tell you the truth, I have for years wished that Bookpedia/Delicious Library could merge its features with Bookends. From my point of view, the work of organizing books into virtual shelves according to courses (and, for students whom I supervise, according to topic and also to mirror the physical shelves in my office library, departmental library, and university library) is very closely related to what I do in Bookends or in Mendeley, and doing it all in one application would make a lot of sense. I've always refrained from making suggestions along these lines because of a vague sense that it would be seen as frivolous and that it would probably be too great a programming task for the number of users who would appreciate it.
rickl
Posts: 182
Joined: Thu Sep 16, 2004 4:47 am
Location: Japan

Re: Feature Request (Improvement/Modification to Attachment Flow)

Post by rickl »

I forgot to mention that Bookends' ability to find an appropriate cover image for books, including Japanese books, without any user intervention, is amazing, and it's what makes it possible for us to dream of the enhancements discussed here.
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