Object Hierarchy and Breadcrumbs (forked from Collections 2.0)

Talk
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If you’re responding to my points, I don’t know why you’re talking about breadcrumbs. You may have missed it, but in one of my replies to you I said that I’m not interested in them, and I agree with you that they’re not naturally feasible. I’m only talking about other forms of hierarchical representation.

I hear that for you, widget-trees are “in practice not very useful.” Great, I completely support you not using them! I’m telling you that in my practice they’ve been incredibly useful, and I’m not the only one who’s said as much in this discussion. In fact, if that feature were ever removed from AT, I might stop using the app (or at least stop updating it). I don’t believe we can have a good-faith discussion if you can’t accept that that’s true for my use case.

As for being careful what one wishes for, I can’t speak for anyone but myself. But my wish isn’t vague or poorly-thought-out at all. I know exactly what I want: the widget-tree in a different visual form. The logic already exists and is functioning. Other enhancements, like the filtering @Zak-from-Zork suggested, or the upward family-tree-style expansion I showed in my diagrams, would be gravy. I think my successful use of widget-trees for months is sufficient basis to forecast how variations on that functionality could be even more useful for me. Of course I could still be mistaken, but that’s the nature of forecasting. I think I’ve done enough of my homework at this point. And I wouldn’t presume that I’m the only one with a clear head among everyone who’s asked for this sort of thing here or in that FR thread.

One last time, for good measure: I know this sort of feature wouldn’t be good for everyone. Probably especially not for you! I don’t know what percentage of the userbase, current or future, it would actually be good for, and whether that would justify the devs spending their limited resources on it. But that’s their call.

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@Astro-L Hey, I’ve only explained that I don’t use the widget navigation.
If you and others like to use it, then I accept that of course, why do you think that I can’t accept that???

The paradox is: basically we both wont similar things (if we we put the details by side for a moment).

  • You wish more features for the widget navigation.
    You love the thing, but it doesn’t fulfill all your wishes, therefore you want some improvements.
  • I on the other hand, also would like more features for the navigation. But for the widgets, I would need much more improvements then possible there.
    – I don’t use the widget navigation, because it lacks for me too many features and representative things.
    For example, I always need to see my Tags and the description and the creation date, to identify my Objects without doubts.
    The existing widget menu doesn’t offer these additional information, because there is much too less space for that. It shows only the pure Object title – that’s much too less information for me.

Therefore, my own navigation concept is based on Query-Views.
A single click in the widget menu opens my main Query that lists all my Queries.
The second click opens the needed Query.
And a third click opens in that Query the needed View.

Now I see my pre-filtered Objects with all the needed metadata (Tags etc) and can quickly sort and filter however I want.
This concept works better for me, then the widgets menu ever could. I use the widget only for the very first click; only to open my main Query that lists all my existing Queries.

For me, using only the restricted widgets navigation, to explore my Space with its roundly 5000 Objects, would be way too cumbersome.
It happens again and again that identically named Objects appear somewhere.
How that happens? – You are doing an intense research about all existing vitamins and you copy some web content from here and there. Over some weeks, you have suddenly four Pages with the identical title “Vitamin A”.
How could I distinguish between them without the additional metadata?

As explained, my own navigation concept works better for me.
– But that doesn’t mean that there is no room left for improvements!
Indeed, a good working up-navigation is an often missed thing!
– But, only … I still can’t see a practicable and really always working concept for that.

Some here in this discussion talk about breadcrumbs, others talk about a kind of tree representation.
Both wouldn’t work, as I’ve explained again and again.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m against improvements or so!
Indeed, I’m racking my brains over the problem a lot, to help finding a good solution!

Til today I haven’t seen a promising suggestion here, nor was I able to come up with one.

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Thank you for clarifying that - I’m glad to hear it. Up until you said that just now, I hadn’t seen you say anything that showed you understood that other people see value in it. Only your own dislikes, phrased in blanket dismissive terms (“a funny gimmick”). I have more hope in a good-faith conversation now.

We must join forces, for justice! :smiley: If widget logic can be applied to a visualization that has room for any or all of those displays, that sounds great. Perhaps like my diagrams, but with more labels than just single letters. Or an expanded Flow with subtext under each object name. I would want to be able to hide them too, for the sake of reducing clutter, but at least having an option to see properties seems useful.

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First step

:grin: