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Old 05-03-2011, 03:25 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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Join Date: 11-02-2010
Posts: 151
Thank you, pawe. Please let me explain how I use UR.

I

I did a lot of favorites, not assigning shortkeys - there are too few of them -, but by expanding the favorites toolbar into a rather long bar, having 2 to 4 clustered symbols in each line of this bar, and then a line before the next cluster, and so on, question of being able to memorize dozens of favorites' symbols.

In order to be able to place this bar onto the screen, as a part of the main screen - which normally would not be possible since in this form, the toolbar can NOT be placed into the main frame, but only superposed onto any other element of it! -, I placed a "search menu" to the left of my main tree (= and then, to the right, the main tree, then the children's tree, then the text), that I do NOT need there, but which is a placeholder upon which then I can superpose the favorites toolbar. (The underlying caption of that search menu remains visible, must that's the price to pay.)

Then, of course, I activated the option "hoist when showing a favorite", and then, I collected dozens of such favorites, which I activated by mouse click there; this setup not only gives me the additional LOW level (= the children), but also the additional HIGH level, a project level if you might say; of course, it's not possible to place the same favorite symbol, then, into several such symbol groups, but then, you can, of course, place clones of the same CONTENTS into optically identical symbols in different such symbol groups...

And then I quickly ran into a limitation of UR: You cannot do but 50 such favorites, even without keyboard shortcuts! (And I would have needed some 150 or so; perhaps 128 would have done...)

II

Thus, I did a thing I never had imagined I would do someday: I split up my monster UR database into several databases, and of course, I now encounter those information repartition problems UR's strength of being able to handle monster databases without fault was originally intended to avoid.

But there are some repartitions that are quite logical, with only a few cloning problems: You can do your computer and programming stuff into one database; you can do your net and telephone stuff into another; you can do your legal stuff into a third one; you can put your tax and social legal stuff into a fourth; you can do your private / psychological stuff into a fifth; you can put your stuff of business 1 (= but without the legal resources and without the site programming but including the site contents) into a sixth; ditto for your business 2 and database seven; you do your religious things (= if there are any) in database 8... and you do a general inbox into database 9, 10... thus, the response times for putting new clips from the web or other are not as overwhelming any more as they were when you had all your stuff in one database...

And I have a database for planning and "things to do", but then, in every normal content database, there is a special inbox (= favorite), and another favorite being called "Net / To Do", and which take the clones for any review / task / edit / other needs deep down in the tree there.

Thus, I try to do my planning in the planning database, where I strictly refrain from putting any resources in, but of course, this "distributed information architecture" has that weak point, up to now, that my referencing any details in the "real stuff" databases has to be done by hand (= since up to now, inter-referencing in UR is sub-optimal), thus the need for browsing daily the ToDo-Boxes of every real-stuff database, on top of my "general efforts"; here, a "master level", INCLUDING really simple (= and automatically updated!!!) referencing would make UR one of the top programs worldwide, way beyond just outliners.

In every of these databases, you can have up to 50 favorites, but in practice, I now use "normal" favorites menus in them, that do not need the additional use of a placeholder menu beneath, but I put that menu vertically to the left upper corner of my screen, and as long downwards as it gets.

As for the dozen or so of databases I'm currently using, I've got an additional keyboard where one click will put the database in question onto my screen (I do it by macros control-o filename return, not by going by the UR Window menu, since thus, it works equally if the database in question is loaded into memory yet or not; I admit there are some databases I do NOT check daily, then...).

Thus, by the limitation of UR's allowing only for 50 favorites per database, I now encounter a lot of further limitations, being created by UR's not having addressed the question of inter-database referencing yet.

And indeed, if UR could give us more than 50 favorites per database, I would re-integrate most of my dozen databases, just having a separate inbox (= from which I distribute the new items 2 or 3 times a week into their right places everywhere, and possible into the more specific inboxes, first, since there's time to do the more specific sorting out when those materials will be needed there), my monster file, and a separate customers' file - those very specific files are always better as files of their own, instead of being interwoven with all your other stuff.

Can we have more than 50 favorites per database, since that'll be a lot easier to implement than automatically maintained inter-database referencing, to start with?
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