Suggestion for Groups Sidebar Enhancement

[mtauton]

Hi Jon,

I have just gotten the new iTunes 7.0.0 and it organizes libraries, music stores, external media, and playlists as subgroups of the above in the sidebar.

I thought that it would be nice to group the types of groups in the side bar of Bookends in a similar manner.

For Example:
Static Groups
Group #1
Group #2
etc.
Smart Groups
Smart Group #1
Smart Group #2
etc.
Smart Groups (SQL)
Smart Group (SQL) #1
Smart Group (SQL) #2
etc.

What do you think? I think that it will make the side bar less cluttered. I have lots of static groups for manuscripts that I am writing for publication in scientific journals and smart groups for authors of interest to me.

Cheers,
Matt

[Jon]

Hi,

I don't know. I'm not sure I see an advantage to this over a strict alphabetical listing, both have pluses and minuses.

Jon
Sonny Software

[danzac]

Just for a second voice, I kind of like this idea. Not a necessity, but for organization and look&feel, it would be great.

Danny

[jadrain]

It would be really nice down the road if the user could rearrange the order of the listing of the groups into something beyond a long, simple, alphabetized list of everything. That way groups in related subject areas could be listed together in the pane. The ability to indent elements of such a user-organized list would be handy, too. And/or the ability to insert blank lines in the pane/list to separate thematic clumps of groups. Whatever the details, any way to organize groups in the pane would be very useful.

Jonathan

[grebmar]

An ability to organize groups into different separate clusters would be nice, especially with very large libraries that will inevitably have a very large number of groups. And grouping smart groups separately from static groups would be very helpful, since the only difference now is italics and plain text, which can be hard to spot in a long list.

[Jon]

I think arbitrary organization might not be a bad idea. But I don't see much of a point to segrate static from smart groups. It really shouldn't matter what the group type is. Functionally, they both fetch the relevant references.

BTW, if you have a hard time distinguishing them, and would be helpful to you, you can increase the font size for lists in Preferences.

Jon
Sonny Software

[jadrain]

If at some point you were to add user-controlled arbitrary organization, wouldn't that kill both birds with one stone? Anyone who wanted to group lists by type (for whatever reason) would be able to do that, albeit manually.

Jonathan

[Jon]

Yes, absolutely. I was just giving my thoughts on that particular request.

Jon
Sonny Software

[jpmckeown]

Yes that is a good idea. I have lots of groups (one for each chapter of thesis, one for each library I visit, priority level for reading, and one for each action done eg read, notes-made, scanned, photocopied) and clusters would avoid one long list of groups. I agree with Jon, it doesn't matter to me whether they are static or smart groups.

[magnilsson]

I agree with Matt's suggestion. It will bring a better way of organizing different types of folders (ie smart, static & sql).

I should add that it is possible to this with the current version, although it requires a simple workaround: I you, for instance, put a colon (":") in front of the names of the smart folders; a dash ("-") in front of the folder names of the static folders; and a "@" in front of the sql folders, they will be sorted appropriately -- that is alphabetically -- with the names starting with the dash at the top.

Magnus

[Gerben]

IMHO it would be nice to be able to put different groups in one folder (like in iTunes) in the sidebar with a little triangle button next to the folder to open/close. Would be a great bonus in organising and easily retrieving refs.

Gerben