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Old 03-07-2006, 06:08 PM
Rbrux Rbrux is online now
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Join Date: 03-02-2006
Posts: 8
another solution?

I am a new convert to UR (three weeks of intensive and enthusiastic use) but have used various outliners and other data managers for years.

I wonder whether the clutter problems described in these forums might be alleviated by the intoduction of greater flexibility/automation in the NAMING of items.

I notice that I find naming items a bit of a bore. Once attributes and text and/or notes have been assigned to an item, it all seems a little repetitive to then give the item a name that is useful, as well as succinct enough not to overtake the data tree.

The consequence I find is that many items under a particular heading will be similarly (and unhelpfully) named.

This is especially the case when I am using UR to make quick notes (eg of a phone conversation).

In the case of emails, which are automatically titled according to their "subject" field, the result is a whole list of messages (alphabetically sorted) which gives no clue as to their sender or chronological sequence.

An obvious way to deal with this is to use UR's views (in particular the child view) and to take advantage of the many sorting options.

This is what I tend to do; however, even in the child view I am faced with a column (the only un-removable one) in which the item title is displayed. And if I have highlighted an item in the child view pane I often have no way of identifying the corresponding item in the data tree.

I wonder whether the "item title" attribute could expanded to give users the option of automatically naming items by reference to (say) three of the attributes attached to the item. This would simply generate a text string that would automatically appear as the item title. Another approach (not necessarily an alternative) would be to have another naming option by which UR automatically assigns the first 3 or 4 words of item text (if any) as the item titlle.

These would simply be options - allowing the user to manually assign an item title if they wish.

I might, for example have a document template that allows me to assign the attributes: date-doc type-addressee. If the template also allowed me to automatically assign the values of those attributes as the item title, the documents in a folder with that template as the default child would appear neatly sorted. (I recall seeing somewhere in the forums that one user uses a the convention yymmdd to deal with dates in item titles - so as to ensure correct sorting. That's a good idea, but is a bit laborious if done manually. Could UR be configured so that when the automatic item title includes a date it is is represented in that format in the item title?)

Having this naming option would mean that items under a parent would appear in a way that lets the user know whether a new subheading might be in order. For instance, in the letter example above the letters for a particular month could easily be moved into a folder for that month.

Again, all of this sort of stuff could be done via the other views, but it seems to me that underlying much of what other users have said about "clutter" is a concern that the data tree in its present form is cumbersome and as a result has limited outliner utility. I have to agree - especially when the rest of the programme (excuse my non US spelling!) is so elegantly implemented.

Even the child view would be enhanced by the presence of (automatically) useful item names.

The approach I suggest, if it is achievable, would not (of itself) reduce the size of the data tree, but it would make getting around it (and refining/adjusting it) far easier.

Could this be done.

And does anyone agree that it might help?

Richard Bruxner
Darwin Australia
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