Sonny Software

hello,

has anyone found a quick way to mark references of interest? I'm hoping to persuade Jon that a few user definable hotkeys to allow us to give references a "star rating" would be useful.

The idea is to be able to scan through a lot of references marking them for further chasing WITHOUT having to switch from mouse to keyboard each time. When you've got a lot of references to sift through the ergonomics really start to matter.

The closest alternative to hotkeys I've found so far is to use one of the user fields and give it a term list so it autocompletes. Unfortunately of course as soon as you go to the next reference the cursor goes to the first field, which means lots of tabbing. So, if we can't have star ratings then a good alternative would be if the cursor in Bookends worked like it does in iTunes: when you edit data for a track in iTunes then go on to the next tract you automatically find yourself in the field y ou edited on the previous track (e.g. if you were editing album on the first track then when you command+N to go to the next track you find the cursor in the right place to edit album again.)

(I should add the reason I want this feature is that once I've done a search and gone to the trouble of marking the references in a particular field I'd rather keep them marked as "not interesting" than delete them completely and risk having to go through them all again if they turn up in another subsequent search).

Anyone got any other ideas?

Well, one quick way to mark records in the current version of Bookends is to use Command-M to place them in the Hits List.

So clear the Hits List first, then mark the references of interest using Command-M. When done, do a Global Change -> Change Fields and put whatever comments you want into, say, User1 of the references in the Hits List.

Jon
Sonny Software

that would do it but it's still not fantastically ergonomic!!

1) you end up with a large investment in time to create a temporary list when one false move can lose all your selecting (as when selecting files in the finder... there is a law of diminshing returns whereby I end up chickening out and copying files selected so far rather than going for the lot.

2) doing a global field change take quite a few key-presses.

What Id like is a system as simple as ticking on a piece of paper is... but more permanent than the tickbox by each reference which you refer to.

Which brings me back to
- Sente's rather lovely hotkeys for assigning keywords (although keywords lack the "toggle" aspect that you really need for sorting through references since you could give more than one to each reference, or...
- iTunes very fine rating system that you can use either hotkeys or right-click menus for, or ...
- the coloured labels that finder and various newsgroup readersuses ( I could envisage colour-coding references for importance for instance)
- the priority etc. flags that mail uses and that you assign with a right-click

In fact I wouldn't mind seeing a right-click menu for assigning keywords, and a separate right-click / hotkey system for assigning a priority/rating.

m

michaelward wrote: 1) you end up with a large investment in time to create a temporary list when one false move can lose all your selecting (as when selecting files in the finder... there is a law of diminshing returns whereby I end up chickening out and copying files selected so far rather than going for the lot.

That's not exactly true. You can't unmark a reference without doing something active, like unchecking the box manually or performing a new Find. It takes more than a "false move".

2) doing a global field change take quite a few key-presses.

If you say so. I wasn't saying this is the best solution for your requests -- I was giving you a workaround you can use right now in Bookends.

What Id like is a system as simple as ticking on a piece of paper is... but more permanent than the tickbox by each reference which you refer to..

I understand that. None of these is trivial to implement, will increase data size (they're already larger than I like), will require a change in the file structure (so be an irreversible upgrade), and will add some (not a lot, but some) complexity.

I'm glad you started this thread, because I'm curious to see how many others think these are important features.

Jon
Sonny Software