I’d love to see the Sorter improved for faster and lighter importing of information. By that, I mean the impact it has on my own brain than the computer’s resources.
One idea I had was that it’d be nice if the sorter would pop out if an item was dragged to any point along the collapsed tray. An acceptable alternative would be to make the little “tag” the hangs off to be the same height as the whole tray, even when collapsed.
Since the tray is attached to the edge of the screen instead of below the menubar, or behind the Dock, the edges make acquiring very fast, but I have to wait for the artificial delay for the tray to pop open. It’d be nice if it instantly “peeked” open along the whole tray height instantly and then fully opened after that same delay.
With the current behavior, I’ll often find some interesting data I didn’t know I would stumble across, and then click-drag-wait-release in that funny L pattern that is dealing with the sorter “Tag”. It’s more often that I am done importing items before I realize that I could have just expanded the sorter and done my dragging. However, at the same time, the spaces in the tray seem too wide most of the time and I end up not using it at all in favor of the simplified experience of dumping stuff on my desktop and then dropping it all onto the Global Inbox alias I created on my Desktop. But this is a terrible behavior for me to get used to because the point of the Sorter as I see is to enable me to stay organized and not have to later dig through my now junk-drawer that is an Inbox Database.
It’d also be nice to be able to color code the backgrounds of each space on the tray, since the icon and it’s label color can become obscured by the items waiting to be imported into DevonThink. Not having to read each group name would mean I might be able to sort items without having to focus my eyes every time I just want to “toss something in that bin”. A custom colored bin would be easier to identify even when my eyes are tired and the world is a tad fuzzy.
I’ve played with using the Groups and Tags window instead of Sorter, but often I feel that there are too many options and equally become frustrated with having to decide what tiny classification I want to give a thing now. Plus, it seems like the Group and Tags window cannot be invoked outside the full DevonThink application by keystroke of gesture (although it can be closed from the typical window close button). I’m sure I could script it somehow, but I’d love to see Sorter improved so that it’s UI and human usability are even faster.
If you’ve got any tips or tutorials about how to wrap my brain around the existing behaviors, I’m open to suggestion.
Love the application, congrats for hitting 2.0! I’m looking forward to the bug fixes promised by 2.0.2 already!