Sonny Software

I have discussed this issue privately with Jon, but as long as it not reproducible on his systems there is—understandably—not much hope for a resolution. I'd be thankful if you could take a moment to run a very short test and respond with the results.

1. Switch your bibliography style to "BibTeX".
2. Turn on the "Formatted" preview pane at the bottom of the Bookends window.
3. [Optionally, turn on the "Edit" pane on the right-hand side of the Bookends window.]
4. Select any reference and try to scroll down across your library as fast as possible (keeping the "down" key continuously depressed or pressing it repeatedly).

The scrolling lags considerably on my system, to the point that it continues several seconds after I have released the "down" key.

Anyone experiencing the same issue? Scrolling on BE11 with the same setup was smooth. Thanks.

Yes. Trying this, it's the same here. Also Bookends produced an error message while doing this, which I'm sending in.

Since I don't see a problem, it may be either that it's system-specific or that it's user-specific (meaning, it may bother some people and not others). So benchmarks are in order. On a rather slow old iMac running 10.6, to scroll through 50 references with the reference pane open at the bottom and BibTeX selected as the format, when I hold down the arrow I get a scroll speed of 2-3 reference/second.

Jon
Sonny Software

On my Macbook 4.1 (a bit faster than your iMac, I guess) I get almost 4 references/second. This seems to indicate a "user-specific" issue, in your words

It is not so much the scrolling speed per se that bothers me. Rather, it is the fact that scrolling continues long after I've stopped holding the arrow key. Here's the sequence of events:

1. I start holding down the arrow key.
2. Time to scroll past reference #50: 13 sec (i.e. 3.8 references/sec)
3. I release the arrow key.
4. Scrolling continues for another 23 sec (about 85 additional references @ 3.7 references/sec) !

If you could somehow prevent the display from accepting scroll requests from the keyboard until it has fulfilled any pending requests (effectively synchronizing the display state with the keyboard state), that would significantly improve the situation. It now seems as if there is a keyboard buffer that overflows before the display has caught up with all the scrolling requests (I mean this as a description, not a technical explanation or suggestion).

Thanks!

… Or, to suggest an alternative avenue, perhaps there could be a cache containing bibliography previews for each item. The cache would be updated each time an item is added/edited/deleted. This would allow the "formatted" pane to be lightning fast, as it would not involve any database and formatting routines for each scrolling request. Just an idea…