Fantastic read by the makers of Tower (A Git client for OS X), on modernising its interface. It’s very well written. Worth a read.
git-tower.com/blog/tower2-yosemite-design
No major ‘dumbing down’ here, no destruction of usability (in pursuit of a new/adjusted interface), no major change in the background colour scheme (for those who are disgusted at the idea of a ‘dark’/‘night’ mode). Just an evolution of the app to fit the modern design trends.
Re: dark ‘theme’. Stackoverflow (popular forum for developers) conducted a survey of 26k+ people and found that a dark theme IDE was the most popular (by 52%): stackoverflow.com/research/devel … 5#tech-ide
So while it’s not for me (I think) there might be a few fans.
I agree a dark theme is useful for coding. Horrible for writing.
Agree, but I can imagine it being useful for researching late at night without affecting your sleep patterns (installing f.lux helps - justgetflux.com/ - more efficient for all those white web pages anyhow).
I know eye-strain-wise black letters on white are proven to be most effective, but in a dark room feels like overkill to me.
PS Not high on my list of priorities, custom color palettes could solve this too.
Sander’s suggestion re moving the tags bar is a very good one.
I don’t know if It has been mentioned yet but I for one would like to suggest the tags labels as they appear in the second to the right View option (similar to the old email view with groups vertically on the left and the files horizontally shown across the top half window with the results shown in the bottom half window) would look better if the font was reduced - just for the tags. As It is my screen real estate space is a little cramped and when I want to look at Name, Modified, Kind, Location and Tags, tags could be much smaller. Still readable but if they were made smaller I could see more of the tags in that space.
Visually, looking at the tags in that column just looks a little wrong, too large for the space. If that font size was reduced It would be easier to read.
Agree. FWIW, the layout of Ammonite interface is stil the best option for tag view for DEVONthink databases, IMO – albeit Ammonite’s UI is rather dated. I like it that relative frequency of tags in a database is shown by font size (tag-cloudish). DEVONthink’s tag view takes up too much real estate with non-essential info.
One possible solution would be to set up saved views and have those across the top of the upper window (again, in the same view that I was just referencing). It’s very easy to right click and kill columns I don’t want to see to do certain kinds of work in DTPO. With tags, I now have to move tags farther to the left and kill file-path or some other attributes to leave the room.
From time to time I want to focus on different aspects of my information. What if I had a Tags (colomn layout) view that I set up as just the name on the left and the rest of the space for tags? I could also set up other views I normally use, file-path for example, size and so on. Then have those saved views set as active column views I could click on to do work in that view (sub-view column layouts is what I would call them actually as the layout is already considered a “view”)
I don’t pretend to comprehend the suggestion, but it sounds like way more options than my brain could comprehend in an interface 
I thought the general drift of this thread was simplification, not complexification 
Seriously, though – I think a more robust inspector grown out of the current Show Info panel would be a great feature, provide many alternatives for controlling views (including tags), and be consistent with most modern OS X apps. For a hint on how this could play out, look at DEVONagent’s inspector.
It’s really not that complicated. I think It makes It easier. I mocked up a couple screen shot examples. Each screen shot represents a saved layout of which columns show. You give that layout a name, save It, and It appears above the file list window.
Mmm. That would work with Tabs perhaps. Nice idea.
Thanks. For me It makes It much simpler. Clicking on a saved view is nearly instant so when I look at all the info but want to drill down on the full date and time, which I normally compress to just the date to save space, I can click on that view, do the work, click back.
Same with Tags, instead of futzing with making the font small on the tags to read them, just click on a saved layout view to work on tags - and switch back to your “normal” saved column view at any time.
I already work like this but I have to alt click and select the columns I want to have shown then resize the columns and perhaps drag them around. One things Macs are quite good at is remembering things with small process steps. Saved searches, saved layouts, It should be possible to do.
As far as my own workflow goes, the less time I am distracted from my screen focus, the better. Going to the Info panel, like alt clicking, takes my focus off the task at hand. Think of It like driving fast on the autobahn. If you are really trying to concentrate on the road and the traffic, does It make sense to look down and start texting, or even reading your gauges? Now cars are beginning to show heads up display, gauges projected on a portion of the wind screen. I think my idea is similar to that. When I am concentrating on my data, It’s hard enough to concentrate and remember what I am doing with one process, let alone a half dozen. Better to place the controls for the different views up where the action is.
Saved view buttons would just be better, IMHO.
I prefer an inspector sidebar that contains all of this info for the selected document. Saved column layouts is too twitchy – but that’s me. I don’t fiddle with columns but rarely.
Any news about the new version?
