[referencer] Anyone interested in maintaining referencer?

[Michele Mattioni]

Dear all,
I'm an happy and old user of Referencer.

I saw there is an interest to continue the development.

I would like to suggest two features that I'm missing from Referencer
to have the best program to manage papers.

1) Tags as gmail labels:

Gmail labels are great, because you can stack them together, each one
with its own background and color to make them quickly recognisable
and have a quick access to the paper you looking for
More over the possibility to add them with a simple drag and drop is
very friendly from user point of view.

I don't know what you intend with hierarchical tags. However, if it's
to treat tags as folders in a file system I think is not the most
useful approach giving the fact it can be tricky to develop a proper
hierarchy of the tags.

Consider this scenario:
tags: to_read, calcium_activation, reviews, morphology

It's clear that the to_read tag is a functional one and can be applied
to all the articles, while the other three are intrinsic attribute of
the article itself. More over there is not stop holder to have a
review which is about the morphology of the cell, so this two can go
together. So in this case, if we use the filesystem approach we need
to create the to_read parent and then the calcium_activation and
morphology as children and finally the review has a children of both
the calcium_activation and the morphology tag, ending up with two
review tags!

This is a lot overhead with only just 4 tags, which can lead to a
dramatic combinatorial increase of tags if we increase the number of
tags. The other, approach, having the tags as a list of attribute for
file will leave the possibility to use them in an easy way.

2) Improve the search ability:
Full text search, author search and journal search should be available.

This are  my two cents and feature I would like to have in referencer.
Unfortunately C++ is not my cup of tea, co I can't really be useful in
developing, but I can be involved in beta testing from the bleeding
edge.

Thanks to have read so far, it was a long one!

Best,
Michele.






On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Andreas Dalsgaard
<andreas.dalsgaard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In response to the inquiry for a maintainer to Referencer, a friend of
> mine and I would like to volunteer for co-maintainership, or what
> would fit best. We wrote a mail to John this Sunday but he seems to be
> busy. Since we have become aware that at least one other person is
> working on referencer* we have decided to send this mail to the list.
>
> We both have a background in computer science and have used Referencer
> extensively and expect to continue to use Referencer in our current
> work in the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg
> University(Denmark).
>
> To familiarise ourself with the code we have have made a few patches:
>  * Fix some simple bugs ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/referencer/+bug/581811 )
>  * Scrolling to the current selection, when visibility changes.
>  * Moved author string to same line as year in icon-view
>  * Enhance the genkey plugin with title and first word of title
>  * Start port to GIO/Gvfs
>  * Do not store filename attribute to get clean diff's when storing
> the referencer file in a repository.
>
> If anyone is interested, you can checkout our hg branch (with most of
> the patches) at http://diverse.smartere.dk:8000/
>
> Our future plans is to add the following features:
>  * Better support for more reflibs, e.g. drag-and-drop between windows
>  * Better support for collaborating, e.g. fancy Telepathy collaboration
>  * Hierarchial tags
>
> Depending upon what other peoples plans are we have talked about
> moving the source repository to bzr in launchpad, as we are more
> familiar with bzr than hg and bugs and translations are already there.
> This would also allow us to easily create a PPA.
>
> Best regards Mads Chr. Olesen and Andreas E. Dalsgaard
>
> *http://github.com/adamplumb/referencer/commits/master/
>
> On 26 February 2010 11:44, John Spray <jcspray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> Lately I have not had time to deal with any issues around referencer.  This
>> is unlikely to change in the near future, so if anyone is interested in
>> stepping in to maintain the software, please contact me.
>>
>> Regards,
>> John
>> _______________________________________________
>> referencer mailing list
>> referencer at icculus.org
>> http://icculus.org/mailman/listinfo/referencer
>>
>>
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>