Home Forums General discussion Whoa! 1.1.5 took away view modes Reply To: Re: Whoa! 1.1.5 took away view modes

Maurizio
Participant
Post count: 196

Hi Beaujean, thanks for the feedback.

> I really don’t like the change made in version 115 by removal of the ‘categories’ function. They made it so much easier to organise groups and families of Tabbles.

I am curious why you need to have groups and families of tabbles at all. Could you please elaborate on that? Could you make an example of a task which you need to do but is difficult or impossible to accomplish when you don’t have groups and families of tabbles?

> The new arrangement – having to move the Tabbles around manually is untidy and unnecessarily time-consuming. Especially, it is untidy as there is no grid alignment.

So, it seems you have two problems with the current solution: it is untidy and time consuming.

As for untidy: please notice that an auto-alignment feature (aka snapping to grid) is ready. A new release with this feature will be out soon. Stay tuned.

As for time-consuming: I admit I don’t see what you mean. It takes one minute to arrange 50 tabbles you already have, and you have to do it just once.

So, please wait until auto-alignment is ready, give it a try, and then come back and tell me if you are still unhappy about it, and why. I promise we’ll fix the problem.

> I don’t understand how new users could not grasp the concept of categories (the rationale given for removing that feature). What could be simpler than the concept of files -> Tabbles -> categories?

I suppose the short answer is that "files -> tabbles" is simpler than "files -> tabbles -> categories". The user was forced to learn a new concept (categories) even if he didn’t need it. For example, in order to create a tabble, you first had to create a category.

If I just want to create a tag, why should I have to give a "category" to my tag? Or, equivalently, why should I have to give a tag to my tag?

A longer reply is in this blog post.

> Could you at least bring the categories feature (as it was in version 114) back as an option? Without them, I don’t like the GUI nearly as much as before and it is not as intuitive or useful.

Bringing back categories has high costs (in terms of forgone users due to the increased complexity and barrier to entry, and maintenance costs). So, in order to reintroduce them, I need to see a very good reason, i.e. a practical scenario where you have a problem which categories help solving (and can’t be solved in a simpler way, like an auto-arrange-tabbles feature).

In general, a problem can have more than one solution. It might be that a problem which is solved with categories can be solved in a better way, without forcing every user to deal with a concept they don’t need.

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> I notice above that you have thought of grid arrangements but that it could be a problem when scaling. Well, it seems to me that the arrangement with categories as they were would allow ‘scaling’ within them?

I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean here.

> Tabbles within tabbles – a sort of "super Tabble"? What is that but a category by another name?

This would be much different. Categories were very limited and very different from tabbles (see the above blog post).