37
the entire QuickTag palette is reproduced in the main menu, you can assign
custom keyboard shortcuts to your most commonly used tags.
•Maintainability. When you first place a reference into the appropriate
collections, things seem fairly simple. But as your thoughts about organization
evolve, you are likely to want to change the collection hierarchy and where
individual references are placed within that hierarchy. This is not as simple to
accomplish as you might expect, because of the way in which static collections
work. For example, if you originally placed a reference three levels down in your
collection hierarchy, it will appear in each of the parent collections as well as in
the target collection. This means that it may need to be moved from each of
those collections if your organization changes. With tags, however, you can
change the hierarchy quite simply, and in many cases the references will not
need to be modified at all.
•Synchronization. Sente is able to synchronize both the tags on individual
references and the definitions for custom smart collections based on tags (or any
other smart collections for that matter). Sente is not able to synchronize static
collections. This means that if you organize your library using tags and smart
collections, this organization will be automatically replicated in all copies of your
library.
Some of these advantages will be made more clear as you read through the rest of
this chapter. If you are not yet convinced that tags are superior to static collections
for organizing your library, please keep reading. As the developers of Sente, we are
convinced that tags are superior to static collections, so this is where we are placing
our energy. We know that for some users the idea of tagging, rather than filing in
collections, will seem strange at first. We think over time you will come to see that
tagging is actually the superior option.
Why Use QuickTags Instead of Traditional Tags?
If you already use tags in another software application, you may be wondering what
Sente’s QuickTags can offer that traditional tags do not. Traditional tags are, after
all, fairly powerful and useful. You can typically assign tags by simply clicking on an
entry in a list of tags, or by typing the first few characters of the tag and the
software will autocomplete for you. After that, searching based on tags is often
easy and rapid.
Sente supports this type of tagging, so why not just use it? Because QuickTags are
much more powerful, flexible and efficient to use. The most important differences
between QuickTags and traditional tags are:
Page 169
