Re: what feature do you crave for?

Frédéric Gobry wrote:
> Happy new year!
> 
> As you probably all noticed, we suffer from lack of manpower, which
> make progress quite difficult. I personally also have a hard time
> focusing on a single feature as several of them are pending completion
> now. In order to maximize collective utility, I'd like to know which
> feature you would find the most useful:
> 
>  a. access to additional on-line databases (which ones?)
>  b. insertion of citations in openoffice
>  c. a better user interface (cite your favorite improvement)
>  d. other?
> 
> Please reply by reordering the bullets above in order of decreasing
> interest, with extra comments if you wish.
> 

Happy new year to you as well!

well I was thinking of getting back into pybliographer again, so I might
be willing to help out, as soon as I have some time on hand. My feature
priorities are:

1.
c. a better user interface (what I'd like to see would be some sort of
tree view for the data base. So that the gui would be divided up into 2
panels, one with a tree view of different subgroups of the database, and
 a 2nd with the entries of the selected item in the tree. Like this:
+----------------------------+-------------------------------
| my_bibliography            | author ..  title ... journal
|      |                     |  .
|      +-|my publications|   |  .
|      |                     |  .
|      +-optics              |
|          |                 |
|          +- fiber          |
|          |                 |
|          +- free space     |
|                            |
| medline search results     |
|                            |
+----------------------------+--------------------------

Ideally all the subgroups could be created and organized using searches,
 or simply be copying etc.
This is the one thing I have been seriously missing in pyblio 1.2
because I find it really hard to organize my bibliography as it is atm.
At one point I even looked at trying to implement it myself, but my gui
programming experience is approx nil and I couldn't see a straight
forward way of actually doing this in pyblio.

2.
a. I think more databases are always useful, as the webinterfaces are
usually quite annoying. The problem is do we use Z39.50. Problem: a lot
of universities/libraries don't provide the connection data (I know my
one doesn't). Try to get the info by parsing the webinterfaces. Problem:
Hackish (IMO) if the webinterface changes, the feature will be broken.
It happened once with the inspec query I wrote. How does Endnote do
this? I know they provide connection files for different databases, so I
guess it is Z39.50, if we could get the info from the endnote files
things might be easier.
I'm willing to help with this part.

3.
d. other:
1. some plugin support: this would enable people to write their own
database searches, etc.
2. multithreading support so pyblio doesn't just freeze while doing a
database query etc.

4. office export
Not a priority for me at all as I use Latex.

Quite a list. This is all based on my experiences with pyblio 1.2 as I
haven't tried 1.3 for a long time, so if any of this is already
implemented, sorry for the noise

Cheers
Jochen

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT
Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your
opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash
http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV