Can we have a four pane view, where the fourth pane is where we can make/view comments about the document? It’s a pretty basic feature, and one I’m amazed is missing in what’s otherwise an extremely powerful document organiser.
Example of use - I might have a photo, and so I want to write a comment about what it’s about (which helps it get picked up in relevant searches), what I might use it for, etc. Or a letter, and might want to note when the date it actually arrived in my letterbox. Or… well, anything!
I know there is the Annotate function - that’s quite powerful for bigtime stuff, but it’s really clumsy for basic day-to-day usage. Plus if it’s a web archive you can’t even see that there’s an annotation, because the web URL is in that spot! And you can write in ‘comment’ and in ‘spotlight comment’, but only by having some quite large supplementary windows open.
And if you can’t do this, can you at least make it so the ‘comment’ field that does exist (accessed in Tools > Show Properties) is available for use on all documents? It’s so stupid that you can only comment on Rich Text documents - it’s the pictures that benefit most from the commenting!
This would not be possible in DT. The metadata available in the ‘Tools>Show Properties’ pane is specific to the filetype. PDFs and some other documents also have this metadata, as can be seen in Preview by clicking on the Inspector icon in the toolbar of a PDF document. If you open a JPEG in Preview, notice that this info is not displayed when clicking the Inspector icon for that document as JPEGs do not support properties metadata.
Tools -> Show Info gives you a variety of properties including Spotlight comments (which are editable). I often simply leave this pane open when I work. However the Spotlight comments can also be displayed as a column if you desire (cntrl click on one of the column headings for the option).
I don’t know if it’s practical (or possible), but how about displaying the annotation in a fourth pane like the “See Also & Classify” drawer. A user could control-click the annotation document and choose something like “open in drawer” instead of “open in tabs”.
Yup, that would be cool. That way, even if the pane were kept small, you’d still see at least the first line, so it would still be immediately obvious if there were a comment there, so if you see the beginning of a comment you could just widen the pane for that document.
RE commenting: would love it if clicking on the comment-symbol (the greyish speech-bubble in the name field of any doc with a spotlight comment) would actually take you through to the comment – e.g. opening up the Info-panel or at least highlighting the spotlight column in the upper part of the three-pane-view if the latter is visible already.
Appreciate the annotation-feature and yet would love (like KP and others here) something easier to access it. Several options to do this come to mind: a) open the annotation as a second tab when the doc is opened b) the optional drawer-option suggested earlier in the thread c) am icon (like the greyish bubble for exisiting spotlight-comments) in the upper pane’s list view, again clickable and displaying the annotation d) a optional split-view displaying the annotation at the bottom of the current preview pane.
I could warm to any of the above since they all make annotating / commenting more accessible. (I am aware of the link to the annotation at the top of the preview-pane; also of leaving open the – rather large – Info-panel to see/work on the spotlight-comment.)
Any thoughts on this from other users, or better even possible plans from the devs?
kithairon