Paperbox Development Roadmap
Feel free to propose your ideas here. Just edit the page (the Login page allows you to register).
Ideas
Preferences
A preferences dialog with options to:
- specify file types to include/exclude
- directories to ignore
- ...
- colour of the tag cloud etc
Cached documents OR gradual metadata retrieval
To avoid retrieving all documents at start up every time (it takes about 10s for 800+ documents on my machine), we could store all previously retrieved document information in a private SQLite database, show everything immediately and then launch the background task of looking up and syncing.
A (probably much better) alternative would be to first display the file names only, then launch the metadata retrieval in the background to fill in the tiles. We could also see if a sliding window + cache approach makes sense.
More metadata that's writeable
The metadata that would be nice to have in RW mode is:
- Title
- Author
- Publisher
ISBN if it's an ebook
Star Gmail style
- Description
- Note / comment
- Source URL
- Read count
- Cover image ?
- More URLs ?
================= --> HJM comments: ================= This is exactly what I'm desperately looking for. I own chaotic mess of several thousand pdfs, docs, txt, pics and spreadsheets, my base for writing a book. What I really need is a tool for efficiently tagging all those files as described above! In early days, authors prepared a slip-box... As I'm no very skilled programmer, I gave up writing a front-end for TRACKER, based on mysql or so. Tagging with Tracker is just to messy. --> CAN ANY READER INDICATE A WORKAROUND until we patiently are awaiting PaperBox doing this useful work? Any hint is highly appreciated! HJM =================
The problem is that often these (together with tags) cannot be written in the source files. ATM I think the best approach would be to have an SQLite database with option to write to the source files when possible. Start with PoDoFo and PDFs and continue with exploring how to write back to the OpenDocument files for instance.
Maybe Tracker and XESAM APIs will eventually allow writing this additional metadata to the central metadata store.
Take metadata from filenames
People often put author names, titles, isbn in ebook file names. Some music software like quodlibet do the following: for example, if the filenames look like "Def Leppard - Adrenalize (1992) - 01. Let's get rocked" then you write <artist> - <album> (<date>) - <tracknumber>. <title>, and it automagically fills the tags for every track.
Browsing day by day
A way to see documents last modified only on a specific date. This is mostly a matter of thinking of the best way to show date navigation. The date picker widget is too big, maybe try something with combo boxes and on mouse wheel scrolling as with paging.
First simple and effective solution could be to display documents added in the last x days.
Tag cloud in context
Stop displaying all tags all the time, show only those for documents in the current view.
Searching and browsing results
...
Pull information from the web
Use Google and/or Amazon book API.
If there are many hits to the search, allow selecting the best one. Or just pick the first one, if the title matches completely? It would be nice to have a possibility here to add a search term if the automatic search was not successful, or did not find the correct book.
It would be nice if users could specify what data to download (from the available - author, publisher, description etc - maybe as a global preference), and if you could select to keep or overwrite existing tags (e.g., to correct spelling errors automatically).
Allow operations on files
Allow right-click on a file showing the same menu that the filemanager shows (open with, copy, share, etc.). This would allow to use paperbox as a filemanager replacement when it makes sense to.
A harder idea is to integrate paperbox right into nautilus.
A simpler idea is to add a "open containing folder" button to quickly get to the "real" file.
Show full path to file
Sometimes a file has no useful title, or it is too generic and is repeated several times, or it is garbled due to encoding problems, or whatever. It would be usefull to display the absolute filename as if it was metadata to help recognize files.
Sort by filename, type, etc.
I would like to be able to sort the documents. I don't see an obvious way to do this.
Exclude directories
I would really, really love to exclude directories. I'm trying out Paperbox as a way to browse my enormous (3,000-ish) collection of academic articles, and it is distracting to me to see other stuff at the same time.
Release history
December 16th: 0.4.1 (notes)
December 2nd: 0.4 (notes)
June 19th: 0.3.1 (notes)
June 18th: 0.3 (notes)
May 1st, 2008: release 0.2.0 (notes)
- November 6th, 2007: Paperbox 0.1 released