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rchiav · 03-27-2010, 07:05 PM

Really, I have an open mind. I've just been involved in software development for quite some time and I think it's better for software to allow users more flexibility in how they chose to work. Having written software since I was 8 years old (and I'm 38 now), I have a pretty good understanding of what's possible and that you want to enable people to do what it is that they want to do without having to do very much to get there. If a fair amount of people want to keep track of where they are in a workflow process, they should be able to do that with 1 or two clicks, or a drag and drop. If tags are to be leveraged to accomplish this, the UI should support adding, removing and finding these tags in a faster and more well defined way than it does right now.

There's a lot of really good stuff in Calibre, so I don't think it's a question of whether or not the developer or developers have the ability to create such an interface. Obviously they do. It seems to be more of a design decision to funnel people to work one particular way, or an indifference to that type of functionality.

It wouldn't be very difficult to make workflow management much easier and quicker and still use tags if so desired. Having read through a bunch of posts in this sub forum, the reoccurring theme seems to be that user after user gets told to change the way they think and work to adapt to how the application is written instead of others having an open mind to the possibility that maybe the application could be adapted to better fit people.

Again, it's not a matter of "if" something can be done. It's a matter of how user friendly and intuitive it is. Right-mousing to select "Edit meta information" -> "Edit meta information individually" and then having to manually delete or type (which could be typo'd) a tag, or clicking another button that brings up a less error prone way to edit tags but will still take 3 or 4 more clicks is not something that seems very efficient. Sure, it associates information with the book that you can find later, but if it's something you're going to do regularly, shouldn't that be something that only takes 1 or 2 clicks? Then you have to manually type in a query string to filter on that information, or scroll through the tag list? Again, it accomplishes the goal but it's not something I'd consider user friendly.

There was another thread where a woman asked about sharing the same books with her husband but setting it up so that he had his own library and she had her own library. Tags were again given as the solution. No doubt you could use tags for that, but this isn't intuitive to people and it doesn't work the way most people think. The software could still leverage tags to accomplish this, but if the interface clearly identified people and what books were in each persons "library", this person would have been happier than anything. This also wouldn't take very much work.

I probably shouldn't have even written this so this will be my last comments on the subject.

03-27-2010, 07:05 PM	#20
rchiav Member Posts: 17 Karma: 23 Join Date: Mar 2010 Device: Nook	Really, I have an open mind. I've just been involved in software development for quite some time and I think it's better for software to allow users more flexibility in how they chose to work. Having written software since I was 8 years old (and I'm 38 now), I have a pretty good understanding of what's possible and that you want to enable people to do what it is that they want to do without having to do very much to get there. If a fair amount of people want to keep track of where they are in a workflow process, they should be able to do that with 1 or two clicks, or a drag and drop. If tags are to be leveraged to accomplish this, the UI should support adding, removing and finding these tags in a faster and more well defined way than it does right now. There's a lot of really good stuff in Calibre, so I don't think it's a question of whether or not the developer or developers have the ability to create such an interface. Obviously they do. It seems to be more of a design decision to funnel people to work one particular way, or an indifference to that type of functionality. It wouldn't be very difficult to make workflow management much easier and quicker and still use tags if so desired. Having read through a bunch of posts in this sub forum, the reoccurring theme seems to be that user after user gets told to change the way they think and work to adapt to how the application is written instead of others having an open mind to the possibility that maybe the application could be adapted to better fit people. Again, it's not a matter of "if" something can be done. It's a matter of how user friendly and intuitive it is. Right-mousing to select "Edit meta information" -> "Edit meta information individually" and then having to manually delete or type (which could be typo'd) a tag, or clicking another button that brings up a less error prone way to edit tags but will still take 3 or 4 more clicks is not something that seems very efficient. Sure, it associates information with the book that you can find later, but if it's something you're going to do regularly, shouldn't that be something that only takes 1 or 2 clicks? Then you have to manually type in a query string to filter on that information, or scroll through the tag list? Again, it accomplishes the goal but it's not something I'd consider user friendly. There was another thread where a woman asked about sharing the same books with her husband but setting it up so that he had his own library and she had her own library. Tags were again given as the solution. No doubt you could use tags for that, but this isn't intuitive to people and it doesn't work the way most people think. The software could still leverage tags to accomplish this, but if the interface clearly identified people and what books were in each persons "library", this person would have been happier than anything. This also wouldn't take very much work. I probably shouldn't have even written this so this will be my last comments on the subject.