MyInfo Community Forums

Great to see the Version 4 feature list and some user-driven activity in the forum. I have been looking forward to most of the features in V4, especially spell check and auto paste in text pane.

I am really keen to see support for creating links to existing tags in MyInfo. Will this be in V4?

Let me explain where the request is coming from. I initially started looking at personal wiki kind of implementations since linking (graph) is a more powerful paradigm than hierarchical trees. Sometimes information does not have a nice tree structure. I did not warm up to CamelCase/wiki syntax and MyInfo was a welcome change. MyInfo has most of the tools required to be used as a personal wiki except that it takes effort to create those links by hand. As much as I dislike CamelCase, it does have the advantage of creating easy/automatic links.

This is where the link to tag comes in. I could create tags while writing a document without thinking how the final structure will look like. For high-level organization, I can still use the tree structure. Later, when I have to link to those documents within another document, I can just create a tag link. The next step would be to have an option to automatically highlight or link tag words as you type. Note that I am not referring to adding tags to a document automatically (say, a sub-document), but creating links to tags that already exist when you type a tag word. Once you have this option, all the linking can be done automatically. All we have to do is create tags appropriately.

-Vin

That's a pretty neat idea flawgic. I definitely second this request. Anything that interelates documents is going to be useful.

One question (well kind of two): would they be retroactive? Meaning, if you type a document, then creat a tag, would the new tag update all documents in the topic with tag-links? Would tag-links extend across topics?

Only one addendum, it would be nice if the tag-links could have an option when printing. I can see times when it would be nice to see them as links in a printed page but also times when I just want to print the page without the links.

Kevin

Thanks Kevin, for backing the request. You raised an interesting point about making tag-linking retroactive. That also made me think about the case where you might have multiple instances of the same tag-word within a document. Highlighting or creating automatic tag-links for every one of them might be distracting.

So here is a slightly modified suggestion. Petko might have some better ideas that might be more viable in terms of design and coding.

When you type a word that is already a tag word in that topic, it gets highlighted (similar to spell check). There should be an easy way to turn on/off tag highlighting. When you click on a highlighted tag word, there should be a popup with the option to convert that into a tag link. This would be similar to correcting a misspelt word. There should also be an option to un-highlight all instances of the tag-word in that document (similar to ignore-all in spell check). Once you do ignore-all, it should not highlight the tag-word the next time the document is opened, unless we do a tag-check again.

In my opinion, the highlight-and-click-to-link method should apply only to tags within the same topic. But it should be possible to create manual tag links that span across topics.

I hope the suggestion does not get axed because it is difficult to implement the click-to-link part. For now, I could live with just the option of manual creation of tag links and automatic tag highlighting. In fact, that might be more in line with the keep it simple spirit of MyInfo.

We are considering adding links to tags and searches from a long time and I think that finally we can do that in MyInfo 4. At this time I can only guarantee that links to tags and searches will be in MyInfo 4. Auto-highlight of tags will be in our todo list for the subsequent updates of MyInfo 4, because it will require additional time and we already have a long list of new features.