So, I started replying on Nat’s “Tab Order” thread, and realized halfway thru he’s talking about tabs in the coding section, not the icons on the main screen. I agree with what he’s saying, but…
My big issue is icons. I have 19 of them, and that’s after ruthless culling of things I didn’t really want to get rid of. Many of them start with the same letters, so “T(partial letter)” is the icon for them. I use my ipad in portrait mode a lot, and dragging to the "S"s is like 15 drags. And it’s only going to get worse as more people make things I need to have on my ipad.
We need groups, or sorting, or multiple rows of icons, or a “list” mode, or something. Please, I beg of thee. How you fix the problem isn’t that important to me - anything that makes projects easier to sort and manage is a giant step in the right direction. (maybe new horizontal groups, to go alongside “examples” and “projects”, and the ability to collapse or hide them? Because - I like the examples, they’re vital, and I want to hide them out of my way until I need them).
Anything. Please. I beg of thee.
PS. To be fair - I also have, what 12 pages of icons (the max, anyway), and lots of folders in the main ipad view. I’m a pack rat, and I stream my music/video, so I have lots of space for my lovely, lovely apps… if nobody else has this issue, I’ll muddle thru… but I bet I’m not alone.
+examples
+projects
- libraries
+ base64
+ fonts
+ 3d
+ other people's neat stuff
Bah - the formatting isn’t exactly right, but you get the point.
Idea being - you have categories, starting with the existing ones - “examples” and “projects”. And you can add more categories (“folders” if you want) and assign individual projects to a specific category. And you can show/hide the contents in each category. Inside each category you might then have the same horizontal scroller as we have today. Like the groups in the ipad home screen, I don’t know if we need sub-groups, ie. folders-within-folders; just being able to have more than a single category would be a giant win.
Until we have the ability to set a “real” icon, I don’t see a lot of value in an icon that’s the first character-and-a-half of the project name. (Even just being able to take a screenshot would be good enough). Once we can do that, maybe a more traditional icon-based “folders” paradigm might be better, dunno.
I’ve been thinking about how to do this and here’s what I’ve come up with. It’s both fairly easy for me to implement, and fits with the current design.
Shortly we’ll be allowing you to edit the metadata for your user projects (long-hold the project icon and choose “Edit Info”). Where you’ll be able to set the description, author, and so on.
In addition to the description you will be able to assign tags to your projects. Next to the “Projects” title, there will be a little down arrow. Tapping it will allow you to filter your projects by tag (with “All” being the default).
That sounds lovely - anything that lets me cling jealously to my data, while simultaneously allowing me to ignore the bulk of it is dandy.
There’s a part of me that wanted to suggest we be able to specify/add tags in the source (ie put the authors name in, for example - kinda like CVS) - but I am thinking that may cause more problems than it solves.