Favourites!

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While the whole left brain/right brain thing might be debatable, there are definitely two schools of thought on how best to navigate and interact with information. I’ll term them “searchers”, and “sorters”.

Searchers

Searchers rely on metadata to retrieve the data that they’re looking for. They’re less concerned about where it’s located in their filesystem, or even what the file might be called, than having fast & powerful tools to find it for them by indexing and searching their metadata.

Sorters

Sorters love organising their files into carefully named hierarchical directory structures. They know exactly where to look when trying to find a file.

Visual models

It’s my guess is that searchers & sorters keep different visual models of their data in their minds. Searchers can visualise the data, and quickly produce keywords and search terms to locate it. Sorters can see a visual map of how their files and folders are laid out in their head.

Different modes of interaction

A search box is perfect for searchers, but leaves sorters wanting. Folders may be a sorters best friend, but go unused by searchers.

WikiPack left the sorters wanting, until now. It had a quick search box, but I get that a lot of people just want to see a list of their pages. And while it’s nice to be able to jump to a page by typing it’s name into the search box, it’s even nicer to have quick access to your most frequently used pages with a single click at any time.

Now there are complimentary tools to make navigating your wiki as quick, and simple as possible. In the sidebar where there used to be only a table of contents, there are now two additional panes: pages, and favourites.

Pages pane

The pages pane simply shows a list of every page in your wiki. You can scroll through and find the file you’re looking for, then click on it to go straight to that page. It indicates pages that have been marked as a favourite with a star,

Favourites pane

The favourites pane shows only the pages that have been marked as favourites. The sidebar remembers which pane you have open, so you can use it to really quickly jump between your favourite pages with only a click of the mouse.

First iteration

This is the first iteration of this functionality, and so far I’m really enjoying it. Now that the functionality is available, I’m finding myself using the mouse more, and I realise how some of you might have been sorely missing the ability to do so. It is a little rough around the edges in a few places, but the core functionality is tight and I wanted to get it out before the weekend for people to have a play with it. There will be further tweaks and refinements coming soon.

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