[chandler-users] Welcome to Chandler: breaking the long page into more welcoming chunks

[Jos Yule]

This is one of the quandaries about Chandler, and by extension, any new 
thing. It takes time to figure them out. I think Chandlers way of doing 
things is quite good, but its not immediately apparent - it takes time 
using it and playing with it. If you try to force it to work more like a 
"typical" todo list manager, you are going to get frustrated.

I don't know how to let new users of the software know that - we want it 
to be immediately usable, but the reality is that it has a different way 
of working with data then most other PIM-style packages.

Having spent some more time using the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird, 
i almost wonder if that wouldn't be an easier entry into using 
Cosmo/Chander, then the desktop... Although you do loose some of the 
uniqueness of Chander (triage, etc), you get exposed to the easy sharing 
of todo/notes/events via Cosmo...

Hard questions to answer.

j


On 25/05/2009 1:04 PM, Graham Perrin wrote:
> Some first impressions of Chandler at
> <http://chandlerproject.org/script/getIrcTranscript.cgi?messagesOnly=true&channel=chandler&date=20090525>,
> here is as good a place as any to respond:
>
>
>
>> i really like the todo feature but i was also a bit frustrated by it,
>> since i couldn't change the order of things *within* the categories of
>> now/later
>> it seems a little bit silly, but even within a group of now or later
>> things, there's a kind of order...
>> maybe it's against the chandler philosophy, but on the other hand i don't
>> see what should stand in the way of users doing this if they want to
>>
>
> One answer to this:
>
> • the order in which things appear becomes more useful, over time; orders
> are based on a variety of criteria (with no need to drag)
>
> • use stars, alarms etc.
>
> Answers to the writer's other comments, re: e-mail, are well expressed in
> the blog. In the Welcome to Chandler areas, we do need to offer an
> explanation that's both condensed *and* more immediately visible.

-- 
Jos Yule
Digital Hyakugei