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Just installed 1.1.5 and now I’m in spatial and the View Menu is gone!
Quite the shock as I have a good number of tabbles and they be everywhere! 😆 I generally use category view. Gonna take me forever to get them corralled and all orderly, and even then… (Tried spatial view one evening and found that, for me, it was impossible to line up tabbles well enough to look any better than a rumpled heap of colorful dots. Snap-to-grid would be helpful for the inartful like me. 🙂 )
Hello again,
Let me stress that you can drag the tabbles in such a way as to replicate the arrangement you had with categories (and with more freedom.) This is not going to take forever, and you only have to do it once.
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You may object that tabbles are not aligned. Two answers:
1) I am planning to implement "snap to grid" . (if approved by my colleagues.)
2) However I am afraid it will not work well when we make tabbles scale automatically according to their files. (see the blog post about this)
I mean, all tabbles will have different sizes, so even after auto-aligning and snapping to the grid, it will not look good. What do you think?
Good morning 🙂
We are planning to make tabbles scale automatically according to the number of files they contain. (Think of an ordinary tag cloud, where some tags are bigger because they are more important.) So tabbles will all have different sizes.
In this case my biggest tabble would be "Pop" I think
But this isn’t my most important tabble
Also my tabble "2009" would grow up 😕I am also thinking that, in the future, we might allow to put tabbles inside other tabbles (in addition to files). _______For example, you may put tabble "Mary" into tabble "Friends"._____ Then we could enlarge tabbles which contain other tabbles. So "friends" would be larger than "mary". That might be a better criterion for deciding the size of tabbles.
This way tabbles would become a generalization of categories.
Two things here and I hope I can express them in a way that makes sense…;
Saw a thread where someone in linking up a file was used to looking for the tabble they wanted under a particular category rather than using the auto-complete function. (love autocomplete, btw! saves alot of time) My quibble comes in when creating new tabbles on the fly when linking in a new file. For instance,I have ‘agencies’ one color, ‘people’ another, document type (legislation, memo, poll, etc) a third, etc. I use probably a dozen different colors and at times end up opening a color (on the link screen) to be sure I’m adding the new tabble to the right color.
Perhaps there is a way we could simply attach a displayed name to the color?
Appreciate the work on adding snap-to-grid, and I can see where that may be problematical in the ground floor display when you include tabble scaling. I’d wonder if you couldn’t add snap-to-grid as a toggled option?
Also, as I used categories as more of an arrangement help, couldn’t a stripped down variation of categories be used? Basically an ability to corral or contain a group of tabbles. User customizable size and placement. When doing that you can restrict the grid to the panel so it will not force formatting on other tabble groupings one may have to the horizontal or vertical. Just a thought.
I posted this in Feature Requests before I saw his discussion so I will copy what I wrote there to here:
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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. 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. 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?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.
——————————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? Tabbles within tabbles – a sort of "super Tabble"? What is that but a category by another name?
Beaujean
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).
Reposting a portion of what I mentioned a few posts up (right above beaujean’s post. you must have missed it…)
"mrdna" wrote: Saw a thread where someone in linking up a file was used to looking for the tabble they wanted under a particular category rather than using the auto-complete function. (love autocomplete, btw! saves alot of time) My quibble comes in when creating new tabbles on the fly when linking in a new file. For instance,I have ‘agencies’ one color, ‘people’ another, document type (legislation, memo, poll, etc) a third, etc. I use probably a dozen different colors and at times end up opening a color (on the link screen) to be sure I’m adding the new tabble to the right color.
Perhaps there is a way we could simply attach a displayed name to the color in the quick link panel?
Since each color I use does denote a ‘type’ and I add several files per day as well as a tabble or two, I ended up taking a screen shot of the colors, writing the ‘type’ on it and taping it to the side of my monitor. A workaround, to be sure, but a workaround nonetheless.
As to adding a box feature… Now I’m not advocating bringing back categories per se as it sounds like you’ve had issues with the code for it, but the ability to group a bunch of tabbles in some sort of a box that I can move around as a unit would be VERY useful on many levels. Besides just grouping them by color one could drop tabbles of various colors into a box that relate to a specific project or whatever. No need to link the box to a tag or anything. It’s job is just to contain and grid a group of tabbles. Naming the box (again, no tag or searchability required) would be a bonus too.
Now I completely agree with you that using alt-c is faster when you know the direction you’re going in. But if I wanted to start at a search box there are alot of programs I could use. I use Tabbles because the GUI focuses me rather than overloading when I’m putting together info for a piece. This is why the ability to box a group of tabbles and scoot the boxes around is something I’d like to see. (and is why I’m so grateful snap-to-grid is being implimented! Info should look orderly, darn it! And, yes, my lack of ability to line-up or grid a group of tabbles freehand is distracting… 😆
(EDIT; I see 1.1.6 is up and the changelog looks like there’s some great stuff comin’ down.)
Hello mrdna,
don’t worry about the categories, in the next release there will be something very similar (but more powerful).
Plus we just thought about another amazing feature (which needs no longer than one day to be implemented) so we’ll squeeze that too into the next release (in a couple of days then). I’ll write something about it on our blog.
Stay tuned! 😀
A.
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