Right - I've finally read through everything here and given it a fair bit of thought.
I've laid out my ideas as clearly as I could below.
If I've not explained myself well in certain areas please ask and I'll try my best to elaborate.
Tabs vs NotebooksThis discussion in its most basic form is about enabling multiple notebooks within a single instance of CintaNotes to allow users to view notes for individual projects with the least amount of clutter & irrelevant information. As the word Tab refers to the GUI element that they might be represented by and not the idea itself, I think referring to the notebooks as tabs is probably unhealthy for this thought process. We should be calling them notebooks to facilitate thinking about them in an abstract sense and finding the best approach – be that with tabs or some other method.
With this in mind I will only use the word tab when talking about the visual program element.
How should CintaNotes look when multiple notebooks are being used?First of all I would like to raise the question “Are tabs the best way to represent multiple notebooks?”
What other options are there? My preference would be the method that Evernote uses - to have a notebook-list above the tag list. This list could be selected in the same way tags can, allowing for multiple notebooks to be selected at once. Selecting multiple notebooks (e.g. selecting 2 of your 5 notebooks) in a tab-bar – even if some highlighting was used – would not be as clear as with the notebook-list method. This would also be awkward if there were a large number of tabs.
As I would likely only have 2-3 notebooks the notebook-list method would take up much less space in the program window. If tabs were used there would be a lot of wasted space in the tab-bar – especially when CintaNotes is maximized.
I can see that a tab-bar might be more desirable for users who plan to use a large number of notebooks. The tab-bar could allow scrolling as it does in Firefox when there are a large number of tabs.
Notebook-list method:
Could we have an option to display multiple notebooks as either notebook-list or tab-bar?
With this feature implemented – how should CintaNotes look after a fresh install?Alex wrote: I reckon that CintaNotes is gaining a niche mostly because of its convenience as a small information gatherer,
and complicating the interface will bring CN a bit closer to Evernote and other monsters of the notetaking industry where there are little
chances to survive the competition. So at least this feature has to be really unobtrusive and clear.
As far as I’m concerned, CintaNotes need look no different until a user decides to add a new notebook.
There should be a default notebook at the start.
If a user adds another notebook, the tab-bar/notebook-list should appear.
If the number of notebooks is at some point reduced back to only one, the tab-bar/notebook-list should be hidden again.
There should also be an option to keep them visible even when there is only one notebook – but it should hide them by default.
While the tab-bar or notebook-list is hidden, perhaps there should be a button or some other visual element for adding new notebooks to make this functionality obvious.
Should there be an option to hide the tab-bar and switch between tabs with hotkeys? I wouldn't use this function but perhaps some would.
To which tab should the freshly clipped notes go to?The default notebook in a fresh install should be called "default" or “notebook” and
NOT “inbox” to avoid any confusion the title "inbox" could cause.
It should also be rename-able – e.g. I would be renaming mine to webclips.
This initial notebook should be flagged as the DEFAULT notebook.
This flag should be re-assignable to other notebooks – both from the options menu and directly on the tab-bar/notebook-list.
There should be a clear visual identifier denoting the DEFAULT notebook on the tab-bar/notebook-list.
When a note is captured it should be sent to the DEFAULT notebook.I am against the idea of captured notes being sent to the active tab. This behaviour would increase the likelihood of mistakes.
“All Notebooks”The suggested “All Notebooks” feature is a necessity and is easily implemented (visually I mean, I don’t presume to understand the programming requirements) using either the notebook-list or the tab-bar.
If someone manually creates a note when “All Notebooks” is selected that note should go to the default notebook.
It was suggested somewhere in the thread that “All Notebooks” (I’m trying to avoid calling it the All-Tab) would also be used as the inbox.
This should definitely
NOT be the case as it would become hard to distinguish which notes need to be moved to other tabs.
SearchingSearch should only search the selected notebook(s)
Selecting “All Notebooks” takes care of the global search.
Active Searches/FiltersThese should not be cleared on tab change - only by clearing the filter.
Global/Local tagsTags should be global but only be seen in the tags bar of those tabs which contain them.
As you have suggested above, hiding the tags that are not present in the active notebook is a perfect solution for this.
(This may also further complicates the tag number tooltip function - depending on how it is implemented)
I'm thinking about local/global from an organizational standpoint but understand that you probably have to consider this from a programming standpoint.
When “All Notebooks” is selected, all tags should be visible in the tags bar, and can be shared across notes from different Notebooks. There would, of course, be no need to differentiate a tag called "test" in notebook1 from one of the same name in notebook2.
Nature of a notebookThe following is how I visualize multiple notebooks being implemented. I am not a programmer (only did a little C++ in college) but with my limited understanding it seems to me that this method is logical and fairly straight forward.
Notebook titles should be treated as special tags within the database.
To differentiate them from standard tags we will say – for the sake of argument – that they are given the character “+” as an identifier prefix. E.g. “+research”
These special tags will
NOT show up on the tags bar – or the tag field on individual notes.
So, for example, notes tagged with “+research” will be “inside” the research notebook.
This would mean that, from a database standpoint, the “notebooks” are not separate notebooks but in fact just filters of the main database.
i.e. When a notebook is selected, CintaNotes is running a filter that only shows the notes bearing that notebooks +tag.
It is important to note that standard users need not understand or even know this fact.+tags should not show up in the tag field in the note edit window as this would be very confusing to new users.
There should be a “Notebooks” field in the edit window that would show what notebook(s) the note belonged to (this would hide the +) and also allow you to edit what notebook the note is in.
Though these +tags should not show up in the edit window tag field, advanced users should be able to avail of them from within the tag field.
e.g. if I tag a note “+research” it will be in the research notebook. This will show up in the “Notebooks” field instead of staying in the tag field.
So to assign a note to a notebook from the edit window I can, for example, type “+college” into the tag field or type/select “college” in the notebooks field.
Implementing multiple notebooks in this way would allow for notes to be common to more than one notebook. I think this would be an excellent thing, and addresses something that has been mentioned as a weakness of notebooks/projects earlier in this thread – e.g. a note on programming is relevant to your college project you would want it to be in both the “college” and “programming” notebooks.
(this is a feature that Evernote does NOT have and would be a great plus for CintaNotes)
Something that needs to be addressed if this is allowed –
e.g. the aforementioned note is in both “college” and “programming”.
You are viewing it within “college” and try to delete it.
You would need to be prompted with a pop up that notifies you that the note is common to multiple notebooks, show you which notebooks it is common to, and allow you to quickly and easily edit which notebooks it is in, remove it from the active notebook or delete it from all notebooks.
This also means that you would not need separate trash bins for each notebook which is good.
Notebook ConfiguarationNotebooks should be individually customizable - colour scheme, font style etc.
You should be able to assign special clipping hotkeys for each/any notebook which would send notes directly to them.
Also, I will lodge this as a separate feature request, but I think it should also be possible to decide the padding within and between the note boxes (in percent or pixels)
Some other notes & responsesThere should NOT be an "UNTABBED" option. Notes must be forced to be assigned to at least one notebook. I can understand the thinking – It is analogous to UNTAGGED – but these things are very different and it would be terrible if a note could be deemed both untagged and untabbed.
The default notebook feature removes any need for this UNTABBED option.
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@david_c
I do not entirely understand the hierarchy you have laid out.
Why are there multiple inboxes?
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I for one will not be using my default notebook as an inbox but can understand why this methodology will be useful to many users.
It was suggested that there be a reminder before exit that you have unsorted notes in the inbox.
I think this would be extremely annoying.
If there was an option to show a note count beside a notebooks title – much like Gmail does in a Firefox tab – then such a nag pop up would be unnecessary.
How & why would you use tabs?I think it would be very relevant to ask this question while the implementation of this feature is still being discussed.
With this information from various users I think we could better ascertain the requirements of the feature.
I would have one notebook for Webclips which would be my default notebook - and one notebook for Writing Notes which would, more often than not, be entered manually and not use the clipping function.
I would also probably create temporary notebooks while doing research for particular projects and hopefully be able to use custom hotkeys to clip directly into these notebooks. I would likely remove these upon completion.
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Finally – as multiple notebooks increases the complexity of note organization I feel that advanced searching will become more necessary.
I would, for example, like to be able to search for all notes that are common to two or more notebooks.
Wow… I wasn’t expecting to spend this much time on this when I started
Still, I hope some of this helps.
Thanks again for an amazing program. Really looking forward to multiple notebooks!
Brian