Thanks Jim for this thoughtful post -- I have been thinking the same thing (and experiencing some of the same changes in long-established workflow that you describe) but haven't had time to articulate it.
> I'm reading electronically a lot more, > making Skim highlights and notes as I go, and reviewing those notes in > aggregated article lists targeted to particular writing projects, > either on-screen or printed. At this point my approach has been to build a project-specific group of references in BD & work with a flat file of notes related to that project, but that's not ideal -- I'd need to link that file to each of the reviewed documents or rely on Spotlight to preserve the associations. > Scrivener > is an interesting example, with a note card metaphor that allows you > to create snippets of information that can be mixed, matched and > ordered into manuscript precursor lists, which are then expanded into > manuscripts with additional text. I just looked at Scrivener for the 1st time last week, & one aspect that I really like is the ability to view a set of documents (notes) as if they were a single document. But as you point out, it's not well set-up for co-authoring. > > This isn't a feature request for BibDesk and Skim...it's more of an > early attempt at a use case or workflow description, and what might be > needed to support it. I think I'd like to be able to manipulate Skim > notes individually, as they may represent different concepts that > could appear at different points in a manuscript. I'd like to be able > to search for specific notes across an aggregate of references, with > the result display, perhaps on a palette or in a pane, having a > primary focus on the contents of the found notes with a secondary > focus on the reference from which the note derived. Individual note > objects should arbitrarily orderable on the palette by dragging. Notes > on the palette would have a compact display of their content with > links back to their PDFs and BibDesk entries. It's possible that it > would be useful to allow the entry of new text notes on the fly in > between dragged note objects, and to be able to order the notes > hierarchically (essentially, an outline). It's also possible that it > would be useful to enter additional text to notes on the palette after > dragging. This wouldn't necessarily need to edit or add to the Skim > notes, it could be a local annotation specific to the palette. > Palettes should be savable with names so that they can be reopened, > and notes should be draggable between palettes. > > Palettes represent manuscripts or manuscript sections. Once the notes > were organized in the correct sequence and adequately annotated, I'd > like to be able to export their content, in order, to my editor of > choice as a starting point for writing. This sounds a lot like what I was envisioning -- I'd add the capacity to generate a palette by manually adding notes, not just through search results -- ideally a palette/document could include both manually-created and smart/search-based sections. I suspect this is going to run into the limitations posed by Skim relying on PDFKit -- I don't expect the notes can contain they keyword metadata etc. necessary to do this, so an addl. app. probably is necessary. > > I don't mean to make specific suggestions about user interface or > other details and I recognize that some of this scenario may be naive > or impractical. I do think, however, that it identifies a gap in our > current tools, and I'd be interested in whether others also see the > gap and would fill it in a similar or different way. > ditto, both about the gap and my ideas being naive or impractical..... cheers Derick ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
