Lots of good suggestions here. I particularly support boosting the Document Manager, I'd like this to be a UI for Templates, offer search (SearchKit), viewing meta-data (Spotlight), and sharing Docs and Templates (Bonjour.)
Personally, I'd like a full screen mode (I sometimes use a Wacom for marking/highlights, short notes, and inserting 'scribbles'), and a full screen mode can be conducive to focussing on the task at hand... but its a nice to have, 'sometime'.
I'd also agree with JBL:
Improved macros (mininmally some way of incorporating the find/replace functionality into a macro)
...and ceffe:
I'm very much in favour of a comment/notation feature and think that Jers Novel Writer has the nicest I've seen (it allows putting comments in the margin).
...or visually as expand/collapse Sticky Notes (i.e. on a layer above the text) if you want to be fancy about it, but this may also have the advantage of being able to be toggled on/off, and would avoid reflow.
If, as according to Jerzy Lewak, on Tech Night Owl, the next version (v3.0?) will be around six months, I'll cut back some of my requests to
might be feasible in that time!
1. Document navigation
Navigate via the document's style structure - could presented as a sub-menu of style declarations in the View menu and on the toolbar (but could grow too long for a menu), in a new Drawer palette (e.g. the Utility drawer in OmniOutliner), or a new side-bar view (similar to the outline sidebar in Mellel.)
2. State Retention
In all aspects of the app save the current user state so that I can quit and reopen the app in the same state (inc. open docs and the cursor position, undo/redo history, search history, window/toolbar/drawer/palette states.) Better yet if this state info could be saved as Workspaces, to allow clustering of documents, palettes etc. If not to that extent, then at the very least, remembering open documents.
<rant!>IMHO This feature is vastly under-used in modern apps (Omni-apps, NetNewsWire, others?) and can have a surprisingly big impact on the user experience, IMHO.</rant>
As for longer-term wishes, I'd love to see:
n-up page view
Would be useful to view more than a single page, such as a 2-up view (2 pages side-by-side) for larger monitors, or for overviews when working with distinctive documents, e.g. images/figures, tables, columns etc.
I'd settle for 2-up, as a start.
Ideally, there'd be page thumbnails, maybe in a Pages-like sidebar, but IMHO that's better suited to the doc navigation/outline feature above, and that a thumbnail view (built on the n-up support?) would be best presented via an iPhoto/PowerPoint-like view (technically too much for the app, in it's currently structure?)
It would be great to present this as another view option (to retain the current Page View.) This extra view tab could have pre-sets like the pre-set zoom levels in the Page View, such as 2-up, 4-up, and/or the whizzy dynamic zoom you get in iPhoto, which may seem like eye-candy (and would be a talking point), but would have genuine functional and usability justifications.
I don't envision this as an editing interface in anything below 2-up, but rather a way to navigate longer docs to find a particular page visually, with a double-click to open a page in the preferred view Page/Draft or the optional 2-up mode.
This thumbnail view could also help visualise multi-page sections, by grouping or differentiation (colour-coding, labels etc.), and would allow moving 'self-contained' sections (i.e. sections starting and ending on their own pages,) and thereby rearrange the document structure, which would be reflected in the document outline, in TOC, indexes etc.
The concept might be further extended as a visual interface to linking multiple documents (i.e. drag in documents from Finder or Doc Manager, change order, open etc.), for large doc/book managing, as some have suggested (esp. interesting if said separate document sections were network accessible, and being edited by different users!)
Maybe it's ambitious, but it would make a fantastic word processor!
...this is at least
possible with the current tech in the OS. : )
At least that's what I reckon. ; )