Sonny Software

I think the lack of discussion may simply be due to people being overwhelmed by the long thread. I suggest posting a new discussion thread posing the question succinctly.

Jon wrote:An alternative is to show all notecards, but use colors to distinguish the matching ones (perhaps by making the non-matching notecards gray and uneditable). Is that a palatable solution? Or does that default the a major purpose of the exercise?

It sounds great for me.


Wanderer

monstordh wrote:I think the lack of discussion may simply be due to people being overwhelmed by the long thread. I suggest posting a new discussion thread posing the question succinctly.

You could be right.

Jon
Sonny Software

I like this idea of searching and easily identifying matching notecards. Color coding would be nice.

I'm arriving to this late and I'm reading the discussion a bit too quickly, so maybe this is already out of the discussion or maybe this has been dealt with. But here's my thought: what about representing notecards in the main pane? You currently have two representation modes: Columns and References. What about adding a third button: "Notes"? Then the main pane would list references in one line with one of those cute "disclosure" triangles; hanging from the reference one has indented notes snippets. If the user performs a search, then only those references OR notes with hits are shown. This has the advantage that the user doesn't have to explicitly search for notecards, but if s/he is in the notecards view, the search behavior adapts to this type of representation.

Another issue is that I think that notecards are part of a big text field that BE parses and divides in the notestream view. I wonder if they should not be treated as database objects. In the SQL world I mean a separate table, one row per note, one field linking the note to the Reference record. The advantage is that this would become expandable (i.e. cross-links at the notecard level, tags, separate creation dates, etc.).

Good thoughts. The issue of notecards being virtual fields has its plusses and minuses. They started out as visual aids, and then morphed into being easy ways to manipulate different bits of information associated with each reference. Virtual notecards work find for this. In any case, any change that involved giving notecards an elevated status (peer fields) would require a rather substantial overhaul, and would have to be part of a major update. If it makes sense to do it I'd certainly look into it, though.

Jon
Sonny Software

Yes, I was thinking on the long run. But I think it'd be a good change, especially because users today expect a more note-centered interface (e.g. Evernote, even zotero to some extent). For instance, the idea of a note stack, I'm not sure how that fits with a text stream, how you can select arbitrary fragments of a text field and create a new smart or manual subset. With a Note object it should be simpler from a DB point of view.