[Design] Chandler in a Nutshell

[selva r]

Having three frames (or panes) on the Dashboard screen
serves another purpose in addition to preventing the
email noise in the In Box from clouding up the triage
picture for item kinds.   A two or three frame type
Dashboard model would greatly facillitate the
development of user friendly shortcuts to allow the
powerful tool of stamping to it’s fullest potential.

To demonstrate this, I’ll take the example of the
model described previously where frame 1 was used for
the email In Box, frame 2 for the Memo items, and
frame 3 for the ToDo list items.  

Now, say a user jots down some rough thoughts as
unfiled memos either on their PC or on a future
handheld edition of Chandler running on their
smartphone / PDA.  

Later on, when he / she sits down in front of the
computer to compose these thoughts into a coherent
email, then they could easily locate all of these
roughly captured memo’s collected within Frame 2 and
then just drag the first memo from the Memo In Box
frame over to the EMail In Box frame (Frame 1) and
this action could allow for a shortcut to stamping of
the unfiled memo into a new email event.  

Hence, a new email compose window might be opened up
with the contents of the unfiled memo already pasted
into it.  

If the user has other unfiled roughly captured memo’s
that are also destined for that email file then they
would also be pretty easy to spot by looking in the
Memo InBox frame and they could then be dragged and
released with the curser placed at the exact spot in
the email compose window where memo 2 contents would
be pasted.  

Of course this type of shortcut action could be
repeated for as many unfiled memo’s there are that
need to be organized within that particular email
compose window.

Now, I’m going to extrapolate into a possible future
scenario, where say Frame 2 is used as a combined In
Box for both, simple memo’s as well as special memo’s
containing ToDo list features, and Frame 3 for
triaging OpenOffice documents.  

Again the user could capture roughly thought out
memo’s in their Memo InBox frame (using a PC or
smartphone / PDA) and then later sit down in front of
their computer to organize the unfiled memo’s into a
Writer document.  

Again by dragging an unfiled memo from Frame 2 to
Frame 3, this action could be used as a shortcut to
quickly open up a new Writer page compose window and
automatically paste the memo into the blank page.  

The user could then go back to Frame 2 and grab the
next roughly captured memo that’s destined for that
Writer document and then drag it to the exact spot
within the new Writer page window that the second memo
contents will be pasted on to.  Again, the action
could be repeated as many times as required.

As another example, say a user jots down some roughly
thought out memo’s (again on PC or on smartphone /
PDA) and later wants to insert this into a
pre-existing Writer document.  We could provide a
shortcut with the three frame Dashboard model for this
as well.  

Here, the user could drag the jotted memo(s) from
Frame 2 and instead of releasing it into an open area
within Frame 3, they could release the mouse with the
cursor placed on the title bar of the pre-existing
Writer document.  (It may be neccessary to first
scroll Frame 3 to first locate the pre-existing Writer
document).  This action could then open up the Writer
document being selected as well as a small dialogue
box beside it requesting the user to point and click
the spot within the document where the jotted memo is
to be inserted.

Having a single In Box list format for Dashboard makes
it very difficult to provide user friendly shortcuts
like this especially with the roughly jotted memo’s
being lost somewhere in the email jungle and the
powerful tool of stamping would be too crippled to be
used to it’s fullest potential in day to day life.

Regards,
Selva

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com