[Usability] Questions for the UI Gurus (BibShelf Book Organizer)

[Samuel Abels <newsgroups debain org>]

Hello,

I am developing a book organizer application which currently covers very
basic operations only. (btw., yes, I know about Alexandria, but I was
personally not completely happy with it's user interface and the
dependency agains a script interpreter.)

The project homepage is here:

http://www.debain.org/?site=2&project=20&cat=58

It was not hard to create an easy-to-use interface, because I mostly
just copied it from muine:

http://www.debain.org/stuff/mainwindow.png
http://www.debain.org/stuff/editor.png

While I am quite satisfied with the mainwindow, the editor window could
probably already use some improvements. Also, there will be new
features:

* Additional fields in the book editor: Publisher, Publishing Date, Book
Language, Summary Language and Review Language, and on a long-term view
an image selector for adding the book cover (this will be shown in the
same way muine does).

* On a very-long-term view it should be possible to not only save a book
summary, but complete books instead.

* It will be possible to add a book by looking it up from an internet
database. The search should be possible by author, title, ISBN or
fulltext (=summary and review).

* Submit an existing book from the local computer into the internet
database.

Of course, that could all be packed into the book editor, but then it
would undoubtedly bloat. Having a seperate internet search window on the
other hand probably implies that an extra button is required in the
mainwindow, which I think is not so nice either.

So I was hoping that some UI Guru comes up with a genuine idea to solve
this in an easy and HIG-compliant way.

Any comments?

-Samuel
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