Forum Discussion
Collections UI
I personally quite like the sidebar and styling as it currently is but would welcome the ability to reduce the screen real estate it uses. I am using large screens though , so I imagine on a smaller screen / laptop it would become more of an annoyance. Flexibility and configuration options I guess are the key issues here. As it stands you get what you are given and for many people it wont be ideal.
philrice wrote:
I personally quite like the sidebar and styling as it currently is but would welcome the ability to reduce the screen real estate it uses. I am using large screens though , so I imagine on a smaller screen / laptop it would become more of an annoyance. Flexibility and configuration options I guess are the key issues here. As it stands you get what you are given and for many people it wont be ideal.
Well no need to imagine because I have a standard 13" Inches Laptop beside my PC and I use it regularly, Edge collections panel never felt too big or too small in it.
also it's not like Collections panel is visible all the time, I only open it when I need to save something there or take something from it. so most of the time it's collapsed. when it's not collapsed and visible, I need the thumbnails to be my guide to know quickly what product, article, video, image, gif etc is saved there, otherwise I would have to open them all in tabs to see the contents which would be the same as favorites.
it will of course come down to people personal preferences as to if they feel it takes up too much space or not, so having the ability to configure it will mean the feature will be suitable for more people.
Same with the thumbnails, it depends on how you use the feature. For me in some of my collections the thumbnails are useless and just take up space. I make sure I know what the items are by editing and naming them in a way that I can quickly identify what each one is. I can also see that in some cases the thumbnail could be useful though , so Im certainly not suggesting that the feature be removed, just the ability to remove thumbnails if you wanted to would be nice ( I would rather have them than not have them at all though)- Spoiler
philrice wrote:it will of course come down to people personal preferences as to if they feel it takes up too much space or not, so having the ability to configure it will mean the feature will be suitable for more people.
Same with the thumbnails, it depends on how you use the feature. For me in some of my collections the thumbnails are useless and just take up space. I make sure I know what the items are by editing and naming them in a way that I can quickly identify what each one is. I can also see that in some cases the thumbnail could be useful though , so Im certainly not suggesting that the feature be removed, just the ability to remove thumbnails if you wanted to would be nice ( I would rather have them than not have them at all though)Why not use favorites though? you can do the same in favorites. they are without thumbnails as you like, they can be synced, put into folders, given custom names etc.
because favorites and collections are different, sometimes it is subtle but it makes a difference in how you use them. For example some of my reasons would be:
- You can add notes to collections , you cannot to favorites
- You can add 'snippets' of text selected from within a webpage, or an image to a collection which you cannot do with favorites
- You can easily send to excel or word the collection bringing it together in a nice format , which is good for research or sharing with others
- Collections (imho) are easier and quicker to navigate than favorites. I personally like to have the collection sidebar open most of the time on some of my desktops as it is a good quick way to navigate to certain Admin tools and pages
- with collections it is easy to 'open all' items in a collection (much like onetab works), in favorites it is not.
Now of course your point is why not use favorites instead when I want to not have thumbnails displayed, so the link to images feature for example sounds like a moot point, but it isnt really as for example I could have a collection with 7 or 8 items which includes some images, some snippets, some notes and a couple of direct web page links. The web page links then display thumbnails that give no useful indication of what they are or have any usefulness. For example try adding azure portal and Endpoint manager in the same collection you get the same useless thumbnail for both that just takes up lots of space :
In this case the ability to remove the thumbnail from individual items would be useful.