aurimasv / zotero Goto Github PK

This is an issue to establish the non-technical aspects of the user interface/experience

The project requirements state that

New publications will appear in dedicated, read-only collections within the Zotero application, and users will need only to drag and drop these items into their personal or group library to collect the full object metadata and any associated files like PDFs and web snapshots

I propose that the feeds will be displayed in a separate pseudo-library:

• Feeds will be displayed as nodes in the collection tree
  • Feeds will function similarly to how collections function currently (right-click on library or collection to add a feed)
    • "Add Feed" dialog will request the user for the feed URL and an optional feed title (e.g. the new "Add link to URI" dialog)
  • Feeds will be editable via right-click menu and will display the same dialog as for adding the feed.
  • Feeds can be deleted via right-click menu (confirmation dialog will be displayed). They will be permanently deleted and will not go into Trash (since feeds are pseudo-collections and it would be awkward displaying them in the Trash). While re-adding a feed should not be too difficult, it may be frustrating to lose the information about which items in the feed have been viewed, so perhaps it's worth reconsidering.
  • Feeds will be bold if there is new, not-viewed content and will display the number of new items to the right of the label (e.g. Gmail). Right-clicking a feed will allow you to mark all containing items as viewed.
  • When feeds are fetching new information from the web, they will display an indicator. Update interval for feeds should be configurable (does it need to be configurable per feed? Some sites update content much more often than others)
• The feed library will support assigning feeds to collections and subcollections.
  • Collections will act recursively and will inherit the "not-viewed", item count, and updating status properties from the children.
  • Clicking on any single collection will display a collective list of items from feeds within this collection and its subcollections.
  • Dragging feeds between collections will move them. I cannot think of a good use case for making copies of a feed. Furthermore, if such use case exists, does it duplicate a feed or create a "symbolic link"?
  • Deleting a collection will delete all feeds within the collection. Confirmation dialog will be displayed.
• No Trash
• Consider support for advanced/saved searches. This may be very powerful.

In the right-hand pane, information about individual items in the feed will be displayed.

• All metadata will be read-only
• Not every item in the feed will have an available translator, so raw data from the feed will be displayed for every item.
  • Raw data will be displayed under "Feed" tab
  • We should display as much info as possible: e.g. title, author, date, publication/source information, URL, description (same as Abstract, but always expanded, since this should be the main focus)
• For items that have available translators, we will display fetched metadata in the same format as we do now.
  • Fetching metadata takes time, so this tab may not appear immediately and it may not appear at all for some items.
    • Display an indicator that metadata is being retrieved
• No Related tab
• Should we display tags? Displaying tags seems to have little value when they are read-only, but it might be good to at least be able to filter by tags. (so display the tag filter?)

The center pane will display a list of items from a feed or a collection of feeds:

• It will support a number of columns with basic metadata that can often be found in feed raw data and also has parallel metadata in the Zotero model (title, date, author, source/publication, etc.)
• Items that have not had their metadata retrieved by a translator should have a different item type indicator. They will not have child items.
• Items that have had their metadata retrieved will display the retrieved metadata.
  • If an item had an attachment (other than Snapshot), it will display them as attached links.
• Items that have not been viewed will be displayed in bold
  • Clicking on an item in the center pane will mark it as viewed
  • Marking an item (or a set of items) as viewed or not-viewed will be possible via the right-click menu
• It will be possible to drag and drop items from the center pane into personal or group libraries
  • For items that have metadata retrieved via translators, this metadata (along with Snapsots and other attachments based on user preferences) will be added to the destination.
    • Metadata can also be supplemented from feed data
  • For items that lack metadata, as much metadata as possible will be filled in from the feed's raw data. A Snapshot will be attached if indicated in preferences.
  • What would dragging the same item multiple times do?

Remaining questions:

• How many items from the feed do we display? All? Configurable?
• Do we keep items that were previously retrieved from the feed? How long do we keep them for? (probably configurable)
  • In either case, is there any need to be able to mark items that should be kept indefinitely? While this is a common feature in feed readers, I don't think it is necessary here, since whatever item you want to keep, you can just drag to your library.
• Do we need to be able to clear/delete items from the list?
• Does the feed list sync? I'm guessing that yes, in which case, I think we would want to sync the list, the viewed/not-viewed info, and the fetched metadata (so we don't have to re-fetch it on each client). @dstillman, how difficult would it be to make this happen? (i.e. can this reasonably be part of the current milestone?)

Blocker for #4

CC @dstillman @simonster @stakats

Helpful when collapsed. Only bold when collapsed?

Probably a general issue, but will mostly affect feeds.

debug: https://gist.github.com/fcheslack/066958ebc98244a94258

The second instance does not get populated, and the first one somehow loses the title from all items.

Sorry if I'm adding things here that are discussed elsewhere. I looked around but didn't see this, though. Would it be possible to include more information about a feed when adding it? For example, the name of the author of the feed, which may be different from the author of the post might be useful.

Not entirely sure that this is even possible

Not sure how or where, but a tooltip (#11) is not possible in a tree view. Perhaps if we transitioned to HTML-based UI.

One possibility is via a context menu entry, which would appear only for feeds with errors. Clicking the entry would display some sort of dialog with information.

The tooltip was also going to display last sync time for all feeds. That idea might have to be abandoned.

When accessing the right-click menu from an individual item in a feed list, the tool tip displays when hovering over the first item in the menu "view online". Displays "go to this item online." No tool tips display on hover for any of the other items in the right-click menu.

Probably a general issue with copying from one library to another.

i. e. feed title (probably hyperlinked to the website) and feed author

The data would be auto-populated from feed metadata. Title is required (mostly by Zotero), but author may not be available. In that case, we can either not display it or allow the user to enter a name (I don't think many people would care to do that).

This would have to be specific to feed items and would not carry over to other libraries when dragged. This might fit best in a redesigned right hand pane and could read something like "from Feed Title by Author" at the bottom or top of other data.

Continued from #23

E.g. http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/current.rss http://www.sciencemag.org/rss/current.xml

E.g. PubMed feeds http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/erss.cgi?rss_guid=1xUFNDUH9GgiD9eeR6Ljrx-zdeGINHL8zH8b7JxoQa_O5c8QNf

has authors like Xu Y, Wang N, Shi ZX, Li YB, Zhou XQ, Sun ZW, where we flip the author first/last names

but then again, there's Arieta Kuksin C, Gonzalez-Perez G, Minter LM, which we might as well bail on

Feed reading functionality added to the Zotero client will allow researchers to receive notifications from their favorite journals and other publishers as new publications appear. New publications will appear in dedicated, read-only collections within the Zotero application, and users will need only to drag and drop these items into their personal or group library to collect the full object metadata and any associated files like PDFs and web snapshots. If necessary, these collected items can then be passed to Zotero’s existing institutional resolver service.

https://github.com/aurimasv/zotero/tree/feed-discovery is the dedicated branch for this feature implementation

When an item is selected from a feed in the middle panel, the far right hand panel still has the same options: info, notes, tags, related. How might tags relate to feeds and to items in feeds? In other words, will tags become associated with the feed or would tags only become associated with the item? Either case, what would happen to the tag if a user moves an individual item from a feed into one of their collections? Will the tag stay associated with the item?

These are messages that pop up in the error report on opening Zotero for Firefox with the feedreader add on:

[JavaScript Error: "bad script XDR magic number"]
[JavaScript Error: "TypeError: Zotero.DB.valueQuery is not a function" {file: "resource://zotero/bluebird.js" line: 4691}]

Feeds should probably have their own sort and view prefs, defaulting to date-descending .

Because the right pane is read only for feed entries, the full text of long fields that are truncated in display mode can't be read. This may only matter for abstract.

Would it be possible to place a feed icon in the browser url bar when you go to a feed url so that users could simply click on the icon to add it to their Zotero feeds?

For items, mark read or unread depending on which one makes up larger portion of selection (same as for keyboard shortcut)

Also add for collections

Institutional repositories (IRs) will be able to accession content directly from participating researchers’ Zotero libraries via a “My Research” Zotero collection. This new collection will be accessible to all new and existing Zotero users, though users will also be able to hide the collection if they’re not using it. By dragging an item to the “My Research” collection, users will assert authorship, and the Zotero software will display a warning message reminding them that they should only add self-authored materials. Like all other content stored on the Zotero server, items added to “My Research” will remain subject to removal in the event of a takedown notice.

https://github.com/aurimasv/zotero/tree/my-research is the dedicated branch for this feature implementation