Another example of people behaving differently and wanting different things.
Actually, I like the Name field’s behavior when Info is opened, as it makes for the quickest way to grab the name of a file into the clipboard when I’m referencing file metadata. But I’ve never accidentally changed the name of a file, so I don’t worry about the possibility that I might do so.
Oh, well. It would only cost me a second or two per operation if Name auto-selection is removed.
The developers would undoubtedly have more leisure time if all users wanted the same features and behaviors.
I’ve also taken advantage of being able to cmd-C copy the Name field immediately after opening the Info panel.
If no one else sees this as troublesome it’s not worth changing, even if I disagree with it from a conservative usability standpoint (i.e. it being too easy to accidentally do something that’s irreversible). And the Name really is more recoverable/replaceable than other fields.
But I wouldn’t mind explicit Cancel/Okay buttons, and maybe even Next/Previous buttons. More like the iTunes Info panel.
Maybe I have too much “leisure time” to be thinking so much about this?
Thank you for your kind comments, Bill the Evangelist.
Following some comments I received, I have slightly revised the way I handle bibliographical references, in order to automatically create customised bibliographies.
See detailed explanations with screenshots in my post GTD on Devonthink: Bibliographical references revisited on my blog.
I think this topic needs resurrecting. Does anybody do as Rudi suggests? Does it work well? One potential problem is that you can’t search on any open Bookends database, so you’d have to have a clear separation between searching and editing or adding new entries.
Devon promised us BibTeX compatibility and they delivered. I went to the Blackwell Synergy website and downloaded a few references as a BibTeX file. In the DT Pro File menu, I chose Import/FIles & Folders and selected the file. I now have a sheet with title, author, journal, volume, number, pages, year, URL, eprint, and comment columns. The next step is to export my whole Bookends database and a BibTeX file and import that in the same way. And I guess that’s the integration we’ve been hoping for. The rest, I suppose, is up to us, at least for now. What would be a sensible way to use these goodies in our workflow. I’m still a little dazed after discovering the import went so well (I hadn’t really understood what a sheet was until a few minutes ago), so I can’t even begin to address the issue today.
I’m really frantic about the new sheet file format! I’ve imported a BibTex library and it is really exciting to see how DT suggests related artciles, given the abstracts in the sheet records.
Now I assume that most of us would like to manage the references within another application and not within DT itself and rather use the semantic AI feature and the general search function to integrate the library with other material in the databse (PDFs etc.). I use the social reference bookmarking system citeulike.org/ which can export the references as a BibText file. Other people may be using Endnote or some other application.
Now my question is: Is there any way (maybe with AppleScript) to kind of reference the working file (BibTex) of an external reference manager so that DT always has access to the most actual status of the library? Right now it seems to me that one must export and import/index the BibText file everytime one wants the DT to be up to date.
Thanks for bringing this up. I’ve been a little surprised at the lack of apparent excitement with the new functionality, considering many of us have been looking to integrate our working environments. I agree that the BibTeX import and sheets are some of the most exciting innovations with DT Pro. I think for a version 1 they’re amazingly functional, and I’m not expecting any great improvements in the immediate future. Going forward, though, I agree that it needs to be taken further. I’ve attempted to put my thoughts into some kind of order below.
As you say it would be great to have some kind of auto-updating feature. I update my references often enough for regular import-export to be a little inconvenient.
When referring to an article by exact title from anywhere in the database, the title becomes a link to the appropriate sheet item. But when referring by alias, the alias becomes a link to the whole sheet. Why? (And if other people don’t have this behaviour, please let me know, so that I can find out what I’m doing wrong.)
My feeling is that the BibTeX parsing may be a little too unforgiving. I have a file of about 800 references and DT Pro consistently imports only about 570 of them. This is supposition on my part because there may well be errors or strange or missing BibTeX keys that I’ve missed. But ideally I’d like DT to import the lot or just miss any problematic ones and carry on to the end of the file. My suspicion is that it stops completely when it gets confused. (Apologies if I’m completely mistaken here.)
Straying a little off-topic, I tried out citeulike when it first came out, and was impressed with the idea, but gave it up when I discovered (as far as I recall) that the journals it knew about were very limited and you couldn’t export stuff into it from your own computer. Visiting the cite/site just now, it struck me that the limitations of the early days have been overcome. Would you care to expand a little on how you use it and how it compares to whatever you used before?
Before CiteULike.org I used Endnote and I imported the references via different platforms, such as Web of Science. Now I can import the articles directly from most journal platforms, such as sciencedirect. What has changed for me are basically two things:
1.) I can manage my database from anwhere because I the library is not local and more importantly
2.) I’m receiving RSS feeds from interesting users I discovered and from for me interesting tags, e.g. citeulike.org/tag/behavioral-economics which is great considering the ever growing information load. So it’s the collaborative filtering aspect that really drives my enthuasm for CiteULike.
How DT Pro will interact with CiteULike, that’s what I’m still discovering, so I can’t tell much right now.
I just tried out Bookends 8.1.1 and imported some references from Amazon into my Bokends database. I checked the box “Import to Hit List” and went to “File” -> “Export references (Hits)…” -> Export Hits as: Bibliography format -> Output the selected references in the format of “BibTex” as “BibTex” -> “Make Bib”. But when I import the BibTex-file to DT Pro only some of the references are there, some are vanished.
I dont´t know if this is a fault of DT Pro or Bookends, but maybe someone in the forum has an idea
Same with me, no entry is recognized, only the field names. My bibtex File was UTF8 encoded, I tried files with only Latin characters, files in Japanese. They were created with BibDesk, I used the .bib and the .bibtex extension, my text editor shows all entries.
I have found the magic formula for importing references into Dt. I was trying to use tab delimited export from BE and it was terribly inconsistent as well when I imported it into my Dt database. Anyway, this works perfectly:
Export out of BE into a tab-delimited file
Drag the resulting file onto the Filemaker icon (you can download a demo if you don’t have it)
Export the resulting database using Comma-separated text
Drag the .csv file onto your Dt database. Voila, all the records are there and a new sheet is created.
Watch your UTF encodings. You can set the UTF encodings for import into a Filemaker database and for import text encoding in BE. If you don’t set them properly, you’ll get messed up entries when they include such characters as ñ or é
This is a nice system for people having trouble. An alternative is to export from Bookends using BibTeX as plain text, then change the extension to .bib (this is a step more than necessary, but I found it solved problems for me) , and use DT’s Import Files & Folders dialogue. But you do have to make sure all your references have a BibTeX key.
With the bibliography imported and maintained as a BibTex-format sheet in DTP, I’d like to make links from a Group to separate records in the sheet. I collect comments and snippets of text from books and papers in documents, collected in separate groups for each book and paper. I also would like to link back from the Group to the record with the bibliographic reference in the sheet.
I have not found any way to link a group to a sheet record - or the other way round. Something I have overlooked?
It’s not (yet) possible to add links to sheets/records. But in the next release it will be possible to add replicants of records to other groups. That should be at least one “way to link a group to a sheet record”.
I use Endnote 9 for bibliography work. I prefer to keep it separate from DTP, but a few times I have exported EN libraries (files) as text or RTF into DTP for quick access via searches. EN will also export in html or xml, but I haven’t tried that.
The company tends to issue frequent and very buggy releases, but 9 is stable and it’s finally beginning to look more like an OS X interface. Best part is the rapid access to library catalogs and downloading them in the EN format; also if you drag-drop links into the fields, they are live (clickable). Worst part is trying to design a new output filter or connection file; the interface is clunky and unhelpful.
