Hi Lisa! I guess one person's intuitive is another person's UI clutter :)
I find the manual sort feature very intuitive. The user drags-and- drops where he/she wants them to be in the To-Do view, and new tasks to the view are added to the bottom of the list, intuitive. Where else would you add the new tasks? I don't want the new tasks at the top after I manually moved my important and/or urgent tasks to the top. In the middle (now I am just being silly)? Alphabetically (I don't think so as I want to spot my new tasks as they come into my manually sorted view)? At the bottom of the list makes sense to me, intuitive. This notion of mixing manual sorts with other secondary sorts is not only not intuitive to me, but I don't know how you could possibly implement it. Your view that is sorted by due date is a good example. Let's say you have the following due dates in sorted order 1,1,2,2,2,3,3,4,4,5,6,7,7,8,9. Now you manually move things around without changing the due date because you want some at the front of your attention regardless of the due date. Let's say your new manually sorted order is 1,5,2,2,3,7,4,6,2,3,4,7,1,8,9. If any new task comes in dated 1-7 where are you going to put it in that sequence? How would MLO know where to put it if not at the bottom or end of the list? Primary, secondary, and further sorts are possible when sorting on fields. But when a user manually sorts a list (random), I don't think secondary sorts are possible (but I have been wrong once or twice in my life) :) I believe that manual sorting as presented is a very useful feature particularly if the user does not try to manually sort everything on the list, just because he/she can. My recollection is that his feature request for manual sorting arose because users were not happy with the results from hierarchical or Computed-Score sorting algorithms (although these algorithms have improved greatly over the years). Users wanted the ability to "tweak" the results and move tasks around to where they thought they should be in the view. If you have a list of 50 tasks in Computed-Score order and you want to move 3 to 5 tasks to the top of the list, or move a few tasks, that are near the top, down the list, I think Andrey's manual sorting works quite well. I don't believe that you are suggesting that if you are manually sorting that you must put all 50 tasks in a precise order, or else all you would be doing every day is moving tasks around your view every time a new task pops into the view. I do see the value in being able to go back to the view before it was manually sorted (fresh start). I am doing this currently by having an "automatic" view and a "manual view". But if the consensus, and more importantly, if Andrey believes that another check box to the UI is more intuitive, then I have no great objection to that (not that my opinion matters that much in the great scheme of things). Best regards, Ron On Jan 28, 11:15 am, Lisa Stroyan <lstro...@gmail.com> wrote: > At 09:52 AM 1/28/2010, you wrote: > > >If you want to go back to your automatic sorting, just go back > >to your original Will-Do view. I think the functionality for what you > >want to do is already built in. > > It's not just about whether we are able to get it to do what we want > if we work at it, but more that we want to help Andrey find the most > intuitive and user-friendly way to present the new feature. One of > my favorite things about MLO is the combination of power and > intuitiveness - a rare combination. I don't find the manual sort > very intuitive in the way it is presented right now, especially > because it's unclear when it will get rid of the sort order. > > There is also nothing in your workaround that addresses one of the > biggest issues I see: I would like tasks that get added to a view to > be added in the sort order that would be used if they weren't > manually sorted, not at the end. I would see this as a huge > issue. Suppose I have a view that is sorted by due date that I work > out of all the time. I move something up in the list because > although the due date hasn't changed, I want it at the front of my > attention. Now, I have a manually sorted view. Then I add tasks > that are due soon into the list. They current go to the bottom of > the list, and there is no obvious way to say, "reset everything to > automatic sorting". Also reordering my tasks in this view makes the > view pretty pointless, because new tasks are not sorted by date. > > It's probably too hard of a change to fix this, though....which is > why I suggest changing the UI to make what it already does more intuitive. > > I do find the feature very useful - I can just see that there are > going to be views in which it's not worth ever using manual sort > because then that sort would have to be maintained by hand for new tasks. > > Lisa > > ---------- > Lisa Stroyan, mailto:lstro...@gmail.comwww.empathic-parenting.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To post to this group, send email to mylifeorgani...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to mylifeorganized+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en.
