[Chandler-dev] Why is sometimes hard to dump a thought into Chandler?

[Randy Letness]

Mimi Yin wrote:
> Jeffrey, Travis and I chatted briefly yesterday about a fast and dirty 
> pass at a quick entry web widget that users can plug into their 
> iGoogle homepages, OSX Dashboard, Vista Dashboard, etc.
>
> We decided to optimize for the case where the user wants to quickly 
> enter a whole series of items one after another. So we provided a 
> single-line text field where you can enter the title and then simply 
> hit Enter to submit the item without having to click on a Submit button.
>
> After thinking more about this, I think one of reasons why someone 
> might hesitate to dump stuff directly into Chandler and instead pull 
> up a text file or pull out their paper notebook first is that when 
> entering information into Chandler, you still have to 'decide' what 
> constitutes the item-unit and many times, when you just want to 
> quickly dump something out of your head and get back to what it was 
> you were doing, just that simple decision is a significant barrier to 
> 'quick entry'.
>
> So I think it's actually more important to more closely simulate the 
> 'pull up a text file and start typing' workflow in our quick entry web 
> widget.
>
> We give users a large-ish text field where they can jot down some 
> ideas, we declare the Title to be whatever blob of text comes before 
> the 1st line break and dump everything else into the Notes field of 
> the item.
>
> The downside of this is that users need to manually hit Enter in order 
> to submit the item to the service. But I think this is an ok trade-off 
> given that it's unlikely users are looking to optimize for the rate 
> (speed) at which they can enter multiple items.
>
> Does this resonate with anyone else?
>

Couldn't the widget support both?  The default could be single line 
entries, and there could be an option for multi-line.

-Randy