At 01:40 PM 12/10/2007 -0800, Mimi Yin wrote:
+ Overlays are called overlays and have special widgets because they
don't behave the same as checkbox, multi-selection.
That seems like a circular argument: they're different because
they're different. How is it *helpful* that they're different?
Triage and Stamping are examples of ways in which I feel we've
up-ended existing models.
How so? I don't really see how stamping is especially different from
what, say, Outlook or Ecco can do.
Meanwhile, automatic assignment of triage status based on date
information is a nice feature, but it doesn't seem to up-end anything
compared to manually setting a status, or just sorting by date with
an option to exclude "done" items, or any of the other ways that
other tools have handled the problem.
Perhaps there's something I don't understand?
Sometimes it seems to me that Chandler is a difficult application to
understand because it's too timid to be an "opinionated" application
(one that tells you how to work), but too opinionated to be a "tool"
application (one that simply gives you a uniformly-constructed model
and expects you to shape it to your own opinions).
For example, calling it the "dashboard" instead of something like
"current work" or "for review", hides the opinion that this is where
your stuff is supposed to go. It's almost like the program is
ashamed of telling you what to do... but does it anyway. You just
have to understand the code words. :)
For an example in the other direction, look at Hank Williams'
comments, which are trying to drag the application to the "tool" end
of the spectrum, where the user is given a uniform model and allowed
to make their own decisions about how things should work.
I think either approach can work and be easy to learn *and* useful
for a chosen audience, but the middle ground doesn't appear to work
without a lot of hand-holding, explanations, and "huh?"
moments. I've been doing OSAF work for years and the application
itself still baffles me at times.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
