Hello ! I’ve just discovered DMX and see a great potential for my use cases, as well as some frustrations as a first time user, which I think can be lifted.
Expectations : I’m looking for a software to jot down some items and connect them, without hierarchy. I was greatly inspired by this image and decided to give DMX a try.
Also : I do not want to have to read through the documentation for the basic stuff…
Version : I tried DMX-beta-7 on Windows.
User Experience :
First impression : Initial screen is almost empty and ready to be filled. Great. Sounds intuitive.
Create a first item. I double clicked to create a first item. Doesnt do anything. I still write it here to show you what was my (personal) first guess.
2a. Tried right click. A Search window appears. This is not what I expected. I tried a few things, but eventually I had to dig out the documentation to understand that this Search window is also the one that allows you to create an item.
Quick fix : instead of “Search”, write “Create / Search” ?
2a1 : I write a word and type enter. Does not work. It took me also a few seconds to understand I had to select the “Topic Type”.
However, it’s great that this Topic Type is retained for the next items. This allows me afterwards to right click, type a word, press enter, repeat. Good. But doesnt work the first time.
quick fix : have a default option ? Like “Notes” ? Or make it red ?
2b : Now that i understand how to create a new item, just a comment : on my version, the create/search windows shades all the screen and pops up with full width. In the process of jotting down 10 items this is quite disturbing :
all my screen changes.
I loose connection between the spatial point I clicked (possibly at the very bottom of my screen), and the text I’m now typing (top of my screen).
Fix : i’d rather be able to simply type directly in the background screen, similarly to OneNote for instance ?.. But, in that case, I loose the “Search” feature. Maybe mix that with 1. And allow double-click to simply fill in new items, right click to create/Search ?
Connecting objects :
that worked quite good. Only problem : whenever i connect two objets, the rectangle showing the connection details automatically appear. That’s disturbing and usually does not bring any new information.
Quick fix : do not show the connection details unless user explicitely click on the link
Delete objects
I did not find how to do that (including reading the doc). Commented about that in the beta-7 release topic.
Last one : it’s actually not obvious where to give Feedbacks. Maybe have a “Feedback / Suggestion” Tag in this forum ?
DMX is a multi-user platform. You can perfectly use it single-user, but still you need to login in order to create anything.
If you have no write permission for the selected Workspace you can’t create anything in that workspace. That’s why only the “Search” portion of the “Search / Create” dialog appears.
Login as “admin” (or any other user with write permission) and invoke the dialog again. Now you get the full “Search / Create” dialog.
If you think these circumstances are not well explained by the DMX User Guide please let us know.
thanks for your message with all the ideas! As to the deletion problem: Our documentation refers to how you delete in the latest SNAPSHOT of DMX. In beta-7 this was indeed different, you have to hold the Alt key pressed and then click. Just recently, we decided to drop that and integrate the delete button into the normal context menu. At some point our documentation shall let you specify the version you want to read about, but we’ll only start that when we have actual releases (not beta releases).
Yes, they can! Thank you so much for your profound and accurate feedback. We have turned your input into user stories and will work on improvements. No. 5 is done already.
These are very inspiring hints! Thank you very much!
However, at the moment I don’t know how these ideas could be aligned with some of DMX’s base principles:
Everything is typed. You must choose a type before you can create anything. (For quick notes just choose type “Note”.)
You never want (re)create something when it exists in the DB already (but is not on screen at the moment). That’s why in DMX search/create is an integrated operation (taking place in the search/create dialog).
I would love to combine the directness and ease-to-use of e.g. OneNote with the holistic DMX approach (combining a stable-views UI and bring-to-me navigation with a semantic storage that operates on unique immutable values). In my view there is no obvious design solution for that. I wish it would.
You can avoid displaying detail information within topicmap completely by pinning the detail panel:
If the detail panel is pinned detail information is never displayed within topicmap but in detail panel. Possibly this mode of operation suits you more.
