[chaley]

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Personally I am not a fan of "extra windows" - I would quite happily let it occupy the book details pane area while I am in "view author" mode. On small screen laptops etc popup windows are a *pita* imho.

I am the opposite. I like multi-window interfaces where I control to as fine a level as I want the placement of the information. I have no problem if some parts of a window are occluded or hidden.

For various reasons that revolve around my progressive lenses, I like using close-to-square smaller screens. I use a 17" 4/3 1280x1024 screen by choice. It sits around 2 feet from my eyes. Real estate that I can see without moving my head is key. For that reason I use alt-tab a lot. If I want to have the equivalent of position-locked panes, I arrange them on my screen as I wish.

I would guess one of your reasons may have been to have sufficient width to see the books by an author. For myself, I wouldn't use that. I can hit Alt+A if I want to see books by an author, which gives me the nice "pretty" view with covers, custom columns, tags etc as well. So any valuable data about those books like whether I own them, wishlists, have read etc is all available to me.

The books make depth, not width. Also, Alt-A doesn't distinguish between the authors (does an 'or'). My experience is that the second author is often the one of interest. My goal is to be able to see books by one of the authors, not the union of books by any author.

Then there is another set of users who cannot be bothered with maintaining author data, but might want it easier to get to information about an author - ala the hyperlinked author name like Kovid suggests. As found on this thread the problem is that people will want more than one hyperlink, and there is also the issue of other users who have authors who have no web pages but do have information they want to store about them.

I have no problem at all with adding wikipedia (or what-have-you) hyperlinks to authors on the book details pane.

The next step up (which is probably where I sit and closest to what you have) is where people might like to have an author photo and a comments area. What people do in comments is up to them - whether they make their own minor notes about the author or paste vast swathes of text from Wikipedia. You would still probably want the ability to add links to things like Wikipedia and the author's home page etc, but presumably you could just do that in the comments so have as many links as you want.

The important things for me are to have a list of authors for a book, then to be able to see other books by one of those authors. I actually don't care about the picture and the comments.

So *my* theoretical implementation would be an author pane that can replace the book details one when you hit a hotkey/right-click or whatever (I guess you could hyperlink the author name in book details to flip to it as well). I'm not fussed about seeing multiple authors at once, but that is just me - if a book has multiple authors, you could just click on the hyperlinked author name you wanted if it wasnt the first one which would be the default behaviour.

I never use the book details pane. I can see what I want in the library view, and I can't justify the real estate. As for clicking an author, the problem is that one proposal (Kovid's) is that it open wikipedia, and another (yours?) is that it do a search for books. Perhaps I misunderstand.

In that authors pane, it would have a photo up the top, display the author name below it, and then just fill the rest of the comments area with a text field you can edit and a save/cancel button at the bottom. Double clicking on the photo would expand into a popup window like book details but with editable comments using the same editor as edit metadata.

The editing stuff is what I was going to do. I was thinking of having an 'edit' button that would permit changing the author's name, sort, comment, etc.

As I said, I don't use, and don't want to use, the details pane. Just goes to show that people are different.

My concern, corroborated by your comments, is that what I want is far enough away away from the 'mainstream' that it is weird. I don't mind being weird, but forcing my weirdness onto the general calibre user can lead to difficulties. This is one reason I am considering leaving things as they are, because I can make do with what is there and it isn't much fun doing many hours of work for no personal benefit.