SQL Notes

Posted by PIMfan
Aug 6, 2008 at 05:12 PM

Pierre -

Just wanted to pass on a quick user experience note. I’ve been running the various incarnations of the SQLNotes beta. I’m quite impressed with the depth of features you’ve built into it, and you continued evolution of the capabilities is commendable.

Recently, I had a need to quickly develop an outline for a document. I was looking to “brainstorm” via the outline, and then flesh out the details of each area of the document once I got the outline organized. Knowing that SQLNotes has support for MS Word, I thought I would use SQLNotes to create the outline and also develop the document content.

To make a long story short, I finally had to give up and instead start with an MS Word outline. Why? Because the keystrokes involved to use SQLNotes in “outliner” mode were not intuitive to me and forced me to focus on the “how” instead of the “what” as I was brainstorming. Now it’s quite possible that someone investing time to learn the way that SQLNotes wants me to enter data may eliminate the experience I had. But for some reason, the use of Enter, Tab and Shift-Tab seem to be “intuitive” to me (maybe because I’m used to Word Outlining mode?) For brainstorming, a simple data entry mode that leverages three key sequences would be useful:

1) Enter creates a new item at same level
2) Tab Indents an item one level
3) Shift-Tab “outdents” one level

I know from the SQLNotes forums that an “Ecco” mode has been discussed to allow quick outlining, and I agree that would be quite useful for me also. SQLNotes is a very powerful tool, but a simple “brainstorm” mode that lets me use the above keystrokes would help. I can even envision SQLNotes having a brainstorm mode that presents a simple outline screen with the three above actions available, with the ability for a user to define the keystrokes to Enter, Indent and Outdent when using Brainstorm mode. When Brainstorm mode is exited, the normal SQLNotes operations, keystrokes, functionality, etc would then apply.

Anyway, just thought I’d throw my two cents in on this. You’ve done a great job with SQLNotes, and I’m sure it will be very successful.

PIMfan