behaviour of next/previous reference

Reiner · Post by **Reiner** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 4:17 am

Hi there,

in the reference window there are two buttons for switching to next/previous reference. If I understand it correctly next/previous reference is defined by the way the database is sorted internally.

More intuitive and usable would be if the buttons would use the most actual list view & sortation. So if you have actually displayed a group and open the ref window the buttons should help switching through this group's refs. If you have only shown a search result, than this search result's refs should be used ...

Also it would be nice if the displayed sort of the list view would be used.

I don't know if this is already possible and I'm too blind to see how I could manage it or if it is not possible yet.

Any helpful hints are much appreciated.

ozean · Post by **ozean** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:20 am

On first thought, I agreed with your request, but I find the current order helpful in one regard: it allows me to quickly flip through recent imports.

Usually I would import several references in one go and then work my way through them one by one, editing the contents, adding keywords etc.

However, I agree that sometimes I feel somewhat lost in this view since, for example, I work on one entry for Marx-Engels-Works and then want to see how I formatted another entry of the same series â€“ it will be very hard to find it by flipping or context menu-dragging my way through the reference windowâ€¦

Post by **Jon** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:25 am

There are trade-offs, as ozean pointed out, and being able to move through the references in their actual (not sorted) order has advantages.

You can bring the list view to the front, arrow down one, and then hit Enter or Return to display the next reference in the sorted list.

Jon
Sonny Software

ozean · Post by **ozean** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:37 am

Jon wrote:You can bring the list view to the front, arrow down one, and then hit Enter or Return to display the next reference in the sorted list.

I am currently using an odd windows keyboard on my mac, therefore I am not sure if this is actually the case with a real mac keyboard:

could it be that the standard OS X window rotation keyboard shortcut does not work with Bookends? I usually hit Cmd+< to switch from one appâ€™s window to the next window belonging to that appâ€¦

Reiner · Post by **Reiner** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:58 am

I would solve the thing with the recently added refs by showing "Added" as one column in the list view. So I can't see the trade-off.

I personally would appreciate it very much if this behaviour would be changed because it would save me a lot of time and would improve my personal workflow with Bookends significantly.

But while that is only my personally point of view I wuld be highly interested in other users' opinion on that question. So what do you think?

Post by **Jon** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 8:47 am

ozean wrote:could it be that the standard OS X window rotation keyboard shortcut does not work with Bookends? I usually hit Cmd+< to switch from one appâ€™s window to the next window belonging to that appâ€¦

I use Command-` on my US keyboard, which works with all Mac OS X apps (including Bookends).

Jon
Sonny Software

Post by **Jon** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 8:49 am

Reiner, having an Added column wouldn't work, because, for example, when you replicate an edited book as a book chapter it is placed in the database in the next position (immediately after the edited book reference) but may have a very different date added. The reference window view and the list view are independent of each other (in fact, you can do almost everything in Bookends with the list view closed and the reference window as the main window). You can have the list view correspond to the reference window order by turning off list sorting by default in preferences. There are no plans to make the reference window navigation buttons adhere to whatever the list view sort happens to be at the time.

Jon
Sonny Software