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Here's my suggestion:  for captured material like html pages, it's good to have an editing mode and a viewing mode like there is now.  However, for just plain notes, I'd prefer the editor to just always be in editing mode.  As in, you don't have to click in and out whether it's the pencil or double-click or single-click or whatever.  For just plain notes, you want to be able to go in and start typing, I don't think you want the user to feel any interruption.  Just like this forum's quick reply box--I know if I click inside it, I can just start typing away.  That's what I'm talking about.

-superboyac (March 01, 2006, 01:46 PM)

Understood. I can see this being usefull for Notes, but not for other article types such as Web clippings. I have a new idea or two I'm going try out shortly.

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If you really think my suggestions are useful, I'll keep them coming, especially if you think they apply to the general userbase also, and not just myself.

yes, please keep them coming.

On a completely different note, am I not capturing from the web correctly?  I'm using Firefox, and when I highlight text and capture in Surfulater, it's fine.  But when I capture pictures, there are a lot of those broken links (with the red "x").  What are the limits to capturing accurately from the source in the program?  (I'd post a screenshot, but I've been having a hard time attaching files lately here). 

It should be capturing all images, but not Flash stuff. Let me know the URL of the page in question. You could also try the same page with IE, out of interest.

And the final question I wanted to ask is how to make everything in the right content pane smaller?  I like things much smaller, compact, minimal than most, and everything in Surfulater on that right side is just too big for me.

Not sure what you mean by smaller. Do you mean fonts?

These Surfulater specific support issues would better be handled over on our Support Forums  ;)

nevf, I tried the patch, and it works!  Yes, that is what I was talking about as far as a simple note article.

One step forward.  :)

Re. editing. Besides the pencil you can hold the left mouse button down briefly on any field to commence editing. See the Help. This works the same as in Windows Explorer to rename files. I plan to enable double click on whitespace to also commence editing, asap. If you have any suggestions in this area please let me know.

I am aware of the issue of overshooting a selection and exiting edit mode and intend to try and address this.

These issues have absolutely nothing to do with the language that Surfulater is written in, which is in fact highly optimized C++.

I can't really see why you feel other programs are faster than Surfulater. Maybe the HTML editor gives this impression! I can tell you that I've put a lot of work into making the core engine in Surfulater as fast as possible. Working with very large trees with lots of content is just as fast as working with small knowledge bases. It is this core that enables us to dynamically provide different tree capabilities and views (with more to come), something I think other applications will struggle to do.

From what you've said the bottom line is to improve the editing experience a bit more and we might help get past some of the annoyances that concern you. Again any suggestions in this or other areas are most welcome.

superboyac, Surfulater doesn't have tags at all yet, only the tree. When tags are added they will indeed work much the same as Powermarks, but do more than that.

The tree will still be there just as it is now. If you want to organize in a hierarchy go for it, if you want to use tags then do, if you want to have the best of both a hierarchy and a tags system you can. Nothing will force you into one approach or the other. I'm personally really looking forward to seeing how this works in practice.

Anyone who has worked with large tree's quickly gets frustrated. You can spend more time "working the tree" than getting useful work done. Surfulater provides several tree views such as with/without notes, only notes in a specific folder etc. which help a lot, but large tree's are still a hassle. If it gets too hard to categorize and organize information then people stop doing it and end up with a whole lot of content in an "unorganzied notes" folder as you comment on.

I've also spent some time researching automated text classification systems. The idea here is that new notes could automatically be placed in to specific folders based on their content. After talking to various people, I've decided to put this on the back burner for a while as indications are such systems don't work all that well. Further they'd most likely only be used by power users. That said I'm still interested in this, as well as too many other things. ;D