v41 Feature Refinement: Book Toolbar Auto-hide and Quick-toggle Buttons
We've heard your feedback about the new book toolbar, and we're making some incremental changes to improve the experience. Since we shipped the new dynamic toolbar last year, we've had a ton of great feedback. This has already led to several small improvements, like the interlinear keyboard shortcut and inline search navigation.
In version 41, we are addressing two more frequent pieces of feedback:
Prefer Minimize Toolbars
If you need more space on your screen to read your books' content, you could already click to collapse the button toolbar. If you want to save yourself that click, you can now set Prefer Minimize Toolbars to Yes in Program Settings. The button toolbar will now be hidden by default. If you click a toolbar tab to expand the button toolbar, it will stay open until you leave the panel.
Shift+click to Toggle
Many buttons have menus with both a toggle to turn the view setting on or off, and options to choose the precise settings it controls. You can now control the toggle state with a single Shift+Click, without having to open the menu.
Instead of requiring this to toggle:
You can now also use this:
We hope you enjoy this update, and we'll look forward to hearing how we can improve Logos even more.
Comments
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One thing I'm curious about is if people re-configure these more than they turn them on/off. If on/off is the most common (which it feels like it is for me, at least), then I'd expect just a single click to toggle and a bit more effort needed to configure (maybe a split at the dropdown arrow you have to hover over and click). Shift-click is also nearly undiscoverable unless you show something to indicate it does something.
If the more common use case is actually changing all the knobs, then this makes perfect sense.
Either way, it's great to have a faster way to toggle these off - would be even better if I could get a key bind for each of these to toggle or a way to choose one as a temporary toggle. For instance, I have a request in for Factbook tags to consider allowing the option to have them visible only while shift is being held down to make them available for navigation without interfering with the text the whole time.
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Shift-click is also nearly undiscoverable unless you show something to indicate it does something.
I agree. I'm not sure how best to promote this functionality, but it seems it would have to be communicated somewhere…
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If on/off is the most common (which it feels like it is for me, at least), then I'd expect just a single click to toggle and a bit more effort needed to configure (maybe a split at the dropdown arrow you have to hover over and click).
This is a fair point. What we are talking about here is a tradeoff between frequency and discoverability. The new toolbar design has a strong bias towards discoverability of all the buttons and settings. Grouping them under tabs by function, giving each button a label, and seeing all the settings each time you click the button are all done in service of making those things transparent to the user (especially for the new user).
Shift-click is also nearly undiscoverable unless you show something to indicate it does something.
Also fair. Full transparency, part of the reason we added shift-click so late in the beta was that it was quick and easy technically, and we didn't want to wait until a later version to ship something the could help users. There's certainly still room for improvement, and we want to hear from you (y'all) what you think.
would be even better if I could get a key bind for each of these to toggle
Many of the buttons, especially on the View tab, already have keyboard shortcuts. You find those in the tooltips, or by opening the menu. Let us know if there's a particular one you'd like to see added.
… a temporary toggle. For instance, I have a request in for Factbook tags to consider allowing the option to have them visible only while shift is being held down to make them available for navigation without interfering with the text the whole time.
Interesting idea, thanks!
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I'm not sure how best to promote this functionality, but it seems it would have to be communicated somewhere…
That's certainly the motivation for sharing here in the forums, and we'll certainly update our help documentation as well. If you have an idea how we could expose it in the UI, I'd be happy to hear it.
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I guess from my perspective there's already a pretty standard way of doing that kind of thing in other apps via the split and dropdown arrow I mentioned above. Here's an example of it in action in Microsoft Word:
I went to a Microsoft developer conference years ago where they were discussing why they made the move to the Office ribbon they have today. Similar to your concerns, it was all about discoverability. Nearly 100% of the feature requests they were receiving were for features they already had. 😂 With all of their research, it looks like they still landed on determining that a dropdown like this was sufficient for that goal.
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I think it would be helpful if there was a section within Help that clearly listed the various click-related actions that could be completed in combination with Ctrl and Shift. I'm not aware of any location where these actions are listed.
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I like the idea.
xn = Christan man=man -- Acts 11:26 "....and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch".
Barney Fife is my hero! He only uses an abacus with 14 rows!
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