LEE'S UPDATE - BETA 035 RELEASED

[pje]

FIrst, let me just say that the various d&d bug fixes are awesome!

I can drag to create internal references, and drag stuff between projects without losing order, structure, keywords, notes, or external references. Yay!

The new hover interface, on the other hand, is kind of "meh". I find it actually harder now to make something a child of something else, because I have to wait for the state to change. Before, I could just hover and go. (I can see where the new approach might be helpful for people who do a lot of in-binder linear reorganization, but I personally do most of that by shuffling corkboard cards.) It also doesn't fix a peeve I had with the old d&d, which was that collapsed folders and documents don't open when you hover on them.

It's ALSO harder to put things between other things (although, as I said, I don't do it that often vs. using the corkboard). The reason is that when I try to position something and stop to check if I have it in the right spot, that's just the moment when the throbber appears and distracts me. While I'm frozen in brief confusion, trying to figure out which of the lines means what, it switches to child-drop mode and I'm now stuck. It feels like I'm playing some weird sort of video game, and mostly losing.

I would rather see something closer to the old d&d mode put back, with one change: when you hover a d&d over a collapsed folder or document, expand it after a short delay, the way firefox bookmarks, Windows explorer, and other such programs do it.

I realize this doesn't address the situation of a folder or document that doesn't have any children, but you want to add something to it... so in that case, after the hovering interval, instead of throbbing the icon, why not throb the [+] (expand/contract) box in front of the item? This would then be an indicator that the folder or document is now "expanded" and you can drop something in it. (Once this happened, dropping would make a child, just like now.)

Functionally, this would be just the same as the new d&d (i.e., hover a moment to drop a child instead of a sibling), but without the visual noise and with the added benefit of making it easier to move things inside collapsed documents or folders.

Make sense?

(Oh, almost forgot: it'd also be nice if you could d&d between collections and the binder - I would LOVE to be able to have a "templates" collection and then ctrl-drag new documents from there into the binder. If "expand on hover" worked for the collection/binder tabs as well as individual documents or folders, I'd be able to do that.)

[pje]

I just found out I was wrong about ctrl+drag -- I took the "[+]" box on the drag cursor to mean that the item being moved was being copied, but it's not.

May I suggest changing the hover indicators to not show a [+] box if the item is being moved, rather than copied? It's confusing for someone accustomed to using shift+drag, ctrl+drag, and alt-drag in Explorer to move, copy, and shortcut respectively. For a Windows look & feel, it'd be best if the hover indicators used the same indicator patterns that explorer uses for whether a drop will result in a move, copy, or reference.

Currently, Scrivener only copies on drag when you drag between projects, but the cursor looks as if it'll be a copy when you drag to a corkboard within the same project. It shouldn't do this.

(It would be really nice, of course, if ctrl+drop *would* duplicate the thing you're dragging -- it'd be awesome for doing templates. Right now, I have to find one of my templates, then click it, then Ctrl-D it, then cancel the part where it wants a name (I don't always know what to call things until after I've written them), then laboriously drag the duplicate to wherever I was... by which point I may well have forgotten whatever it was I was going to say. A specialized template feature would be a welcome alternative, of course. )

[AmberV]

Some form of copy drag is on the list already, and indeed it does make sense to use the standard that Explorer sets for for this. Dragging to collections is a form of copying though---really more like automatic shortcuts, but it doesn't move anything anywhere. That is one of the purposes for collections: being able to represent a single item in multiple lists and contexts. They are all linked together and any edit made to an item in one collection will show up in the others, or in the main binder.

[narrsd]

Just to say, I think I really like the new Binder drag-drop, after a moment of getting clear on it by practice.

Reason: you have a lot more feeling of control, and can really choose where the dropped scrivening goes.

No more fiddly-where-is-it-going. That's the win.

In brief:

- Drag a scrivening over another. Drop it immediately. It goes on the same level, beneath the target.

- Drag a scrivening over another, hold it, and notice the dot slowly fading up then down. Once it's faded down, drop the scrivening. It will be placed as a child, indented.

- To bring a child back out, use the first move: drag and drop it immediately on the presently enclosing item. It'll appear at the outer level, just below.


Experience on 035: so far, really good. Thanks, Lee.

Regards,
Clive

[hlarledge]

Thanks, Lee.
It keeps getting better and better.

[altocumulus]

Oh Joy of Joys ... Awesome Job mate ! ..... I raise a Scottish toast to all the team ... Slainte Mhor ...

[wika]

There is experimental code for drag and drop placement in the binder
which folks might love or hate - it's experimental as I said, but the
idea is to try and help with precision drag and drop placement.
You're feedback on this is vital to whether it stays, is augmented,
or just deleted.

Just wanted to give my feedback on this- I like it. In fact before this I used keyboard shortcuts to move documents in the binder because the twiddling to get the documents dropped in the right place drove me crazy. Probably I will go on using the shortcuts, but I like this new feature all the same and I think new users will like it, too. If it was possible to turn it on/off, I think that would be a good solution for everyone.

Ah, I forgot! I only got it working after narrsd's post on how to use it correctly! So maybe this should be included in the tutorial since it is not a perfectly intuitive feature!

[AmberV]

Ah, I forgot! I only got it working after narrsd's post on how to use it correctly! So maybe this should be included in the tutorial since it is not a perfectly intuitive feature!

If this model becomes the adopted one, it most certainly will be.

[pje]

Some form of copy drag is on the list already, and indeed it does make sense to use the standard that Explorer sets for for this. Dragging to collections is a form of copying though---really more like automatic shortcuts, but it doesn't move anything anywhere. That is one of the purposes for collections: being able to represent a single item in multiple lists and contexts. They are all linked together and any edit made to an item in one collection will show up in the others, or in the main binder.

Yep. My use case was actually wanting to drag *from* a collection of templates and drop a copy into my current corkboard or folder. But that's difficult to do unless dragging to the binder re-opens it, or if you could have more than one collection opened in stacked fashion. (I suppose a dedicated templates feature might work better, but being able to do it without a dedicated feature actually means there's more flexibility and fewer things to learn with less code bloat.)

As far as shortcuts go, Explorer uses a boxed shortcut arrow drop hint when the default is to create a shortcut, or if you hold the alt key (to force a shortcut). So it seems to me that if you're dragging something to the references area (whether it's a link, external file, or internal reference) or to the collections, that's the drop hint you should see (i.e., the shortcut arrow hint, not the move or copy hints). This then provides a subliminal learning hint to Windows users that what they're doing is really just creating a shortcut link in the reference area or collection.

Scrivener doesn't have any places where you actually have a choice between copy/move and shortcut, though, so for those two places, it should always be the shortcut hint, and alt-drag would not have a special meaning in scrivener. For distinguishing between copy and move, Windows uses Ctrl and Shift, respectively, to override the default operation.

(While on the subject of Ctrl, I've noticed that holding control while dragging, then canceling the drag results in the selection of a bunch of items in the binder. This is probably caused by trapping Ctrl+mouse down for multiple selection, rather than ctrl+mouse up. I could be wrong though. This is not a big bug right now, but if Ctrl-Drag will actually perform a copy operation in the future, it'll need to get fixed along the way.)

[Lunarclipper]

Download without a hitch. . .check
uninstall old version with uninstaller. . .check
install without a hitch. . .Check
Launch Scrivener when done. . .CHECK . . .and hey, Scrivener found and opened my most recent project with all the cool interface stuff in place BONUS!! Lee, you rock!

[wika]

2. Scrivener for Windows now supports import of Word doc and docx
documents without requiring Microsoft Word to be installed.
Lee

In Beta 29 I was not able to drag and drop all of my word documents. Well, I could drag and drop, but not all of them were changed into a scrivener text document, some of the word documents were simply imported as a link. So I opened them in word, copied the text and pasted it in scrivener text documents. Back then I didn't report that because I thought it was not supposed to work with all word documents even if I HAD word installed.

However, the problem doesn't occur anymore with the same documents - tried to drag and drop them again out of curiosity . I will report if anything odd happens on importing word documents again.

[indigo_room]

Big congratulations on 035! The .doc-import problems I'd had with earlier versions are gone, gone, gone. (Of course, that now means I have to breaking down that 120K-word novel I just imported into scenes.)

Everything in 035 looks fine and acts as it should, so far as I've been able to see. It also picked up my default format settings from the previous install without a hitch.

Kudos!

[Scribe]

This is the best beta version so far in my opinion. Everything is working great. The lag I had with typing on one of my projects in the last beta has gone away. I love this program. You guys are working so hard and we appreciate it!

[Bribrimcb]

Note that a complete uninstall and re-install of Scrivener is required for this release. Please ensure all your work is backed up.

Um, I didn't see this sentence, and I updated it without uninstalling it. Will this cause problems/should I go back and do it again?

[danwdoo]

I've played with the new drag and drop and also would like to say I would much prefer something like what is in explorer (or even IE9 favorites handling). With the current method, when I try to drag one item below another, both end up being surrounded by a box which is not very intuitive. It does work, it just isn't up to the standards I would expect from a program like Scrivener, so I would recommend changing it.