I miss the v1 projects tree at the left of the screen. Somehow, even though it was not the best design, i found it easier to navigate than the current grid with combos above.
Anyway, i would like to request some changes that perhaps could improve the current main screen grid a bit (IMO).
- At the right of "All Folders" combo, a checkbox could exist which would show/hide the "Location" column. It's not always useful.
- Everything seems to be too "large". There is too much lost space between the text of a combobox and its borders and also between the text and the horizontal lines of the grid. Perhaps a "compact" mode would be nice somewhere in settings, which would make all those spaces smaller (or perhaps give the admin the ability to manually define the spacing in combos, grid and other places).
- It would be nice if each grid line could take 2 actual screen lines and be able to define which columns would appear in the 1st line and which in the 2nd (i.e. ID, Title in the first line, all other fields in 2nd line).
- Change the "Projects" combobox to a Tree-combobox (actually add levels to Projects).
I imagine not all of them are easy. Any comments perhaps? I'm really hoping that 1 and 2 will not be so difficult...
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When I removed the projects tree in V2 I expected that there will be some people complaining about this. And to be honest, there were fewer complains that I thought. I think it all depends on how you organize your projects and folders. Some people have hundreds of projects and the project tree becomes very hard to use in that case.
I think that instead of changing the Projects combo to a tree combo, there might be another solution. Currently if you don't select any project, the list of folders is empty. But instead it could be populated with all folders, grouped by project. So it would be possible to go directly to a folder without having to select a project first.
I have to think about the best way of hiding the Location column, because I don't want to clutter the main UI with too many options. Perhaps it should be in some settings window.
Spacing is a tricky subject. I agree that the grid and some other elements could be more compact, but UI must also remain readable. I will try to experiment with this when I have some time.
Regards,
Michał
Hi Michał,
About the Location column, it wouldn't be nice if it was hidden by a setting. I'm guessing that in some cases (when you first open the main page and see all items) it would be useful. As soon as you start diving to each one of the items though, i don't think it's necessary for it to be visible and consume that much space, that's why i proposed such a checkbox on screen. Perhaps an extra button could be added next to "Tools" (top area), named "Settings" and could have a "Show/Hide Location column" item in it.
About how the projects are shown, i agree it requires some thinking in order for anything implemented to be convenient for both a few and a lot of projects. I'll post back if i come up with other ideas...
>>Currently if you don't select any project, the list of folders is empty. But instead it could be populated with all folders, grouped by project.
This would still have one level only (which i though wasn't convenient even in v1) plus as you describe it, it would always be expanded, which would make the combo unusable for a large number of projects/folders.
To clarify, i proposed a tree-combo with unlimited number of levels so that the user could construct as complex a tree as he wishes, but indeed, it doesn't seem very convenient... Maybe if it had a filter over it and as you typed, the projects tree would be filtered...