Improving the sorter

While I like the sorter in principle, its current implementation seems to me a little short on crucial features. That becomes clear when you look at the main advantages it ought offer – and that the respective solutions of the competition (Together, EagleFiler, Journler…) do in fact offer.

In Together, for example, the Shelf (=Sorter in DT) lets you add the essential metadata right at the moment of importing an item. You are able to rate it, label it, tag it, add a comment and file it to the appropriate group (the latter is done with a pop-up menu that gives you much many options than the sorter’s nine slots). In EagleFiler, you can also choose the appropriate library.

With all that added functionality, Together’s Shelf is smaller and less intrusive than DT’s Sorter.

What’s much more important, though, is that it results in a much improved workflow: you click on the PDF or Bookmark bookmarklet – the Shelf appears – you add your metadata – and you’re done and can continue with your research. In DT, on the other hand, you have to come back to the imported files later just to add the metadata. In case you’ve imported 100 or 150 bookmarks, you will most certainly have to re-open one page or the other in order to remember why you imported them in the first place.

That’s a lot of additional work.

And if you are like me, sometimes you will be too lazy to go over the imported items a second time. This will result in a lot of metadata lacking. And without that metadata, DT’s built in AI won’t be able to help you as much as it could. Hence my wish: give us a Sorter that can do more than just sort, i.e. let us choose between nine pre-defined groups. For that, we have the groups panel already – and it’s even more powerful than the Sorter in its current implementation.

I recently began using Together for my miscellaneous notes and found the shelf to work beautifully. Having then gotten the new version of DTP Office, I was excited by the sorter, thinking it would work like Together’s shelf, but have discovered that, like the OP, it is a bit short of features. I’ve used DTP for several years now, but always looked elsewhere for an app for my quick-and-dirty notes and clippings - DTP was always a bit too cumbersome to use for this type of data.

I strongly suggest that the coders review Together’s shelf and see what they can do to the sorter to beef it up.

I, too, use Together for my “quick and dirty” storage needs and love the shelf implementation that its developer Steve Harris has implemented. The shelf is almost flawless and is worth a look by DT developers as they continue to implement DT 2x.

Well, yes. DT seems to be aimed more at working with large databases than at creating them…:wink:

Actually, I was looking forward to replacing Together altogether… (I had bought it only as an interim solution, waiting for DTPO 2 to be released) But that won’t happen anytime soon, I’m afraid. Together is just so much faster for collecting information “on the fly”. And it isn’t just quick 'n dirty (as Yojimbo is, for example). Its vast indexing options might well make up for some of DT’s superior AI capabilities.