Hoisting, multiple trees, tree clutter - User feedback welcome...

[kevina]

Several forum posts and emails we have received contain thoughts and general concepts on how to better manage large amounts of data in Ultra Recall. Some users have indicated that navigating in the Data Explorer pane of Ultra Recall becomes more difficult as the amount of information grows.

Some suggestions received to address this issue include:
- Hoisting - this seems to be generally understood as (temporarily) re-rooting the Data Explorer pane to a child/grandchild Info Item of the actual root Info Item.

- Auto-collapse of all Info Items but the current one, with a way to prevent certain Info Items from ever auto-collapsing.

- multiple, independent trees - user can create additional equivalents to the Data Explorer Pane/My Data in the same Info Database?

- multiple tabbed views - the equivalent of having simultaneous multiple UR applications for the same Info Database, providing multiple "views" into the same .urd file (implemented as a tabbed interface within one UR "instance" somewhat similar to Firefox but including the additional panes of UR).

- other suggestions or combinations?

We use Ultra Recall internally with 1000's of items and have not personally had difficulty navigating through the data. Utilizing the various panes to facilitate navigation, searches, and a quick "collapse all" if the Data Explorer gets too "cluttered" has been very effective for us. However we do recognize that these suggestions have merit and could prove to be very useful.

Here are our current thoughts on the above suggestions, please feel free to post comments in reply. We are hoping to condense the various suggestions and thoughts into a workable, "implementable" enhancement for a post 1.4 version of Ultra Recall (which is currently in internal beta for release by the end of the month).

- Hoisting - this could be useful and should be relatively easy to implement, the main issue is how to actually implement the hoisting/unhoisting graphical interface.

- Auto-collapse - this could also be useful and should be "implementable", the main issue with this idea is when/what would auto-collapse?

- multiple trees - unless we are misunderstanding, we take this to mean that multiple root Info Items (each in a separate visible tree) could be created, essentially creating separate hierarchies within a single Info Database. If this is what is being suggested, wouldn't be the equivalent of multiple Info Databases (which we believe would be better)?. Right now this concept actually is implemented by the Search Pane, which is an independent tree (with a separate root Info Item).

- Multiple tabbed views - this would essentially work like tabs in Firefox, however, each tab would represent a complete view of the data (all the panes would essentially be part of each tab, including a separate history). This seems to be more generically useful than the multiple tree suggestion above, but would be somewhat more complicated to implement. A combination of hoisting and this feature would essentially provide the same capability as providing multiple trees.

Any additional comments, thoughts, ideas on the topic? Please try to stay on topic, we are certainly planning other enhancements as well, however this forum post is intended to distill your ideas on this particular topic into something "implementable"...