Suggestion for change in UI behaviour of columns

For the most part I have little quibble with DT’s UI and with familiarity I have found it to be extremely flexible in a wide variety of situations that require many groups or searches to be open at once and accessible quickly. I think that it fits in remarkably well with the Yosemite aesthetic given that we live in an age of dramatic UI change every few years on the mac. Its a testament to the original design.

There is however one feature which I have seen in a variety of other programs that display large amounts of textual information in columnar format which would be very beneficial for DT to adopt. I have seen it in LexisNexis casemap but more familiar to mac users would be Scrivener. Have a look at the following screen shot from DT:

DT screenshot.jpg

Basically this compression of information only gets worse as the need grows to show more information such as tags or other meta-data. The compression of the name column is particularly problematic because its the number one way to identify a document within a group or after a search. With large number of documents it becomes an unreadable sea of broken up information.

Now, by way of contrast look how Scrivener displays information which is too long to fit in one column:

Scrivener Screenshot.jpg

This is much more readable. One is able to see both the full title and all the tags. The naturally introduced white space also helps readability.

I think the trade-off of loss of vertical density v unreadable horizontal density is certainly one that is worth having. Perhaps it could be a switchable option.

Thanks again to the DT dev team.

Frederiko

2 Likes

I like this idea. +1

I think the term here is “wrap”, and “wrap” could be an option in the column headers:

FWIW - + 2!

I still have very lengthy file names left over from the Windows Explorer days - with a very strict naming regime that sees two prefixes before getting to anything useful in the file name…

I realize each will be different, but this would be really useful to me - my Widescreen ain’t wide enough at the moment to see the filename, much less the tags - all of which are important as a visual aid!

Just posting to add strong support for this feature request!

+1 from me.
(What? You think a guy who works here doesn’t have opinions too?!? :mrgreen: )

1 Like

Trust me, we know you have opinions :laughing:

+1

Along similar lines, column widths (rather than row heights) could be dynamically adjusted, no longer necessitating a double click on the column dividers. I must say, I’ve never seen this implemented anywhere and don’t even know whether/how it might be possible to implement it. I do know however that I tend to avoid column views in all OS X software (the Finder included) because of this issue, especially on the laptop. I know this makes little rational sense (icon views displaying even less information than a crammed column view) but such is (my) human nature…

+1

+1 from me too.

DEVONThink needs to be smarter about how it presents the names of notes.

Currently, it mashes the characters of long titles of documents together until the entire name is unreadable.

Since it is very important to be able to identify documents by their titles, this behavior is really really bad.

Better ideas:

  1. Allow multicolumn names or

  2. Simply do not render the part of the name that goes over the character limit. Show the whole name, however, when the name is selected.

I totally hate how names are currently rendered. It is poor interface design. It makes it more difficult to visually find the document you have stored.

And it arbitrarily limits your ability to create document names to a smaller amount than the operating system allows if you want to see unmashed legible names.

Sorry, but you’re quite incorrect here. This is a problem due to an Apple change and a fix is documented here: DTPO 2.8.8 Name field compressed

Thank you for correcting me.

  • So it looks like Apple changed how text strings are rendered in a field which is shorter than the length of the text string.
  • Before this, DEVONThink would render text strings like the Finder does: Keep the ends of the string legible while mashing the center of the string together. This kept the ends legible.
  • The new text rendering system causes anything other than the system font to mash together the whole string within the confines of the field. If the field is shorter than the text string, this made the entire text string illegible.
  • To return to DEVONThink’s previous Finder-like rendering, the List-View Font has to be changed back to the system font.
  • The only way to do this is by executing the following Terminal commands:
    defaults delete com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2 ListFontName
    defaults delete com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2 ListPointSize

The problem remains how to update DEVONThink so that every font renders correctly given the new incompatibility.

The problem remains how to better improve the user interface of DEVONThink when rendering text strings in columns.

As suggested above, I agree that a multi-line rendering of the name of documents would be far better for recognizing names of documents.

Thanks for the work-around to restore the original text string rendering. The system font will have to do for now.

Just posting to say that even though it’s been a few years, I still hope that DEVONtechnologies will implement Frederiko’s text wrap suggestion. It would be be a huge improvement from my perspective.

It has been 2 years since I wrote my post.

And it has been about 2 years since I stopped using DEVONthink Pro Office.

The primary problem of using DEVONthink for me is that it takes FOREVER to open a database which contains lots of PDFs. And even with a few hundred but large PDFs, it takes even longer to open. I can’t simply spontaneously open and close DEVONthink to use as needed. I have to leave it open all the time or waste a lot of time waiting for it to open. I did not want to work this way. It is frustrating.

So I tried alternatives. Eaglefiler and Keepit (successor to Together) open much faster than DEVONthink. I eventually settled on a premium account for Evernote as a superior alternative to DEVONthink. My PDFs and notes are not only locally and off-line available on a Mac, but they are also - ALL OF THEM - available online and on PCs and iPad/iPhones. And Evernote opens much much faster than DEVONthink Pro.

The one limitation of Evernote is that you can have only 250 groups - not an unlimited number like DEVONthink. You can use tags to replace groups but they are a pain to use as a workaround to groups. Still, for day to day use, Evernote simply is better and faster than DEVONthink for storing files, notes, etc.

Hopefully DEVONthink keeps improving their product - but particularly the speed of opening up a database. The slowness of opening up a database that contains thousands of PDFs made using DEVONthink untenable.

Why is it frustrating to leave DTPO open, in the background?
Over here, it’s never closed!

How many PDFs are you talking about?

I frequently have 9 DBs open, but mostly average 6 at a time.
5 of those, have 11,138 PDFs inside of all of them, collectively – some of which, are PDFs that are in excess of 300mb’s in size.

I just quit DTPO, and then timed re-opening all 9 DBs – 14.24 seconds.
I don’t know if that is slow for you or others, but I don’t find that disastrous.
By contrast, opening a simple Word file (with Word not being open in the background, so it must be launched), takes a smidge over 11 seconds…

How many items and words (see File > Database Properties) does the database contain and how much RAM does your Mac have? Usually it’s a matter of seconds.

1 Like

After two years, I really hope that this problem will be fixed. I really want to see the implementation of Frederiko’s text wrap suggestion as it is exhausting to resize the columns to read titles.

I so agree with these criticisms of the UI. This is one of three things that DEVONthink vitally needs. Compare DT3’s view of items added to my inbox this morning with the same items added to Keep It:

DT3:

Keep It:

The other two things are split screen views and a functioning iOS app (it’s just impossible to edit RTFs on the latter, though Keep It’s been doing that superbly forever).

I’m not saying that Keep It is a better app: DT3 has some superb features; it’s just that the UI always seems to be lef w ay behind.

1 Like

+1 for “wrap” option

Another +1 for wrap.