Onfolio Group Blog

Auto collapse open folders in Feeds

I haven't posted anything here in too long, so I thought I should get back into the swing again.  The past few weeks/month have been very busy testing the release candidate here, so you can understand where all of the time goes. 

I wanted to touch base real quick on a new preference that was added that is subtle, but makes a huge difference, at least for me.  This new preference is available in the Reading tab of Feed preferences and it is called, "Collapse open folders when opening a new folder."  When this is checked on, only one folder at a time in the Feeds tab can be expanded.  This is because each time you try to expand a folder other than the one that is currently expanded, the folder that was left behind in an expanded state automatically gets collapsed.  Obviously, this would not occur for a parent folder when expanding a child folder of that parent.

I tend to have a good mix of folders and feeds at the top level and I thought this would be a good pref to add, but I didn't realize how much I was going to like it after it was added in. 
This pref is not available in the collection tab as of yet, but we already have a feature reqest added to the  feature tracking database for adding this at a future release. 

Here is a thumbnail for a  screenshot of the new pref under the Reading tab in Feeds preferences

 

Onfolio 3.0 Wishlist

I think it is safe to say that most users of Onfolio 1.0 will be happy with the changes that have been made in 2.0.  I am not most users and am already thinking about what I would like to see in 3.0.   I think that everyone wants to see increases in performance, decreases in memory usage and file size, so I will stick to fun features that I hope get considered, and included in version 3.0 (or even 2.1 because these really should not be to hard to implement).  :)

• Visit counts:  I use Onfolio as a bookmark manager about as much as I use it for a feed reader.  I bookmark tons of stuff and only get back to a fraction of it.  At least it is their if it is needed.  One think I would love to see Onfolio include in the next version is a counter for link items.  Something so that I can see how many times I have visited a page (via Onfolio) and preferably sort by visit count.
• Synchronization:  This seems to be a popular topic, and I will throw in my opinion.  Its just to easy to be in front of a few computers each day.  The ability to synch feed status and feed lists between multiple machines is hugely important.
• Local File Monitor:  I am not sure what will come of integration with desktop search programs, perhaps nothing, but I do know that I have a lot of files on my computer that I would love to have included in searches in Onfolio.  I don't always want to add the files to Onfolio, but I do want to search them.  I would love to see a way to tell Onfolio to add all files in a set of directories to the index (as a shortcut to a local file), and then index them.  I also think this alit should monitor those folders for changes and add new and updated files to the collection as they become available.
• Blogging, blogging, blogging:  The blogging support in Onfolio is ok.  Next step is to reach to greatness.  When I post to my blog I set categories, keywords(tags), and often point to other files.  I would love to see Onfolio further embrace the blog based method of information sharing and expand the ability to format posts, add post metadata, and actually I would really love to see the ability to retrieve, edit and repost items all via the Onfolio interface.  If only everyone would use WordPress like me and then the guys at Onfolio would not have to worry about making this request work with all the other blog engines.
• RSS Enclosures:  Some nice handling of enclosures would be cool.  My suggestion is that for each feed we be allowed to select either a collection/folder or local folder to automatically download and store enclosures in.
• Web Posting:  The last thing, at least for now, that I would like to see is the ability to better format and control the web pages and RSS files that Onfolio publishes.  I think it would be great to be able to build Onfolio templates, similar to how we build blog templates, that would pull data from Onfolio on a schedule for web posting.  Each folder we chose to publish can be assigned a template which allows us to take all of the components (link, description, keywords etc) and place them in our own HTML with our own CSS.  That would be very cool.

Well, those are my wishlist items.  What are yours?  Regardless of what happens with 3.0 (or 2.5) I think that Onfolio is a great product with an tremendously improved set of features and functions...here's to the future.

Onfolio Tip: Better way to email items from Onfolio

Many of you have probably noticed that when you send an item from Onfolio to Outlook, the message that comes up on your screen is modal, meaning you can't do anything else until you have completed that message.  I find this really annoying because I often want to look up and add some other information before sending the message, but I can't do anything until the message is sent. The way I get around this now is by hitting the "Save" button on the message. This puts it into my Inbox where I can open it later, add the information I want and then send it.  Since it took me about 6 months to figure this out, I thought I would share it on the off chance that someone else was in the same boat.