[Design] Getting in SYNC :-)

[Alec Flett]

Jim Sowers wrote:
>
> The syncing dialog right now is focused on collections in the context 
> of calendars.  However, collections will eventually contain 
> everything, verdad?  So, my question is: Will we have the ability to 
> sync a segment of a collection?  Let me describe why this is important 
> in my use case.
>
I think there are two things to understand here:
1) Syncing is done on a per-collection basis, which means that the union 
of all of your collections will most likely contain all of your items... 
however you don't have to sync all of your collections, you can just 
pick and choose which ones go up on the server.
2) In the long term we'd like to have ways for the user to create 
rule-based collections which will often manifest themselves as 
"filtered" collections - i.e. one collection could be a subset of 
another collection. This is actually how the Mail/Tasks/Calendar buttons 
work in the toolbar - they filter selected collection in the sidebar so 
that you're only looking at items of a given type. Internally, we're 
creating a rule-based collection, based on the original collection 
selected in the sidebar

Finally, keep in mind that while all of your contacts may live in the 
'soup' of items that is the repository, they only have to be visible via 
certain collections. Rather than a classic app that segments items of 
each type into separate areas, your contacts don't have to live soley in 
a "Contacts" collection. Instead, they can exist in any of your 
collections along side mail messages, tasks, etc. e.g. in  "My Items", 
"Work" or what have you.

Alec
Alec

> Since I was part of the DOJ team that brought the first antitrust 
> lawsuit against Microsoft (in 1994!), I have been weaning myself off 
> of their apps (but not their OS).  But, I must admit, I think Outlook 
> is very good, and I miss the integration.
>
> Now I have my contacts stored on Yahoo! - 2738 of them!  Thus, having 
> a service that I know is backed up is important to me.  I download and 
> re-import into Thunderbird every once in a while, but it's a pain.  I 
> could see using Chandler as my new uber solution -- however, I'm 
> concerned about sync time when it starts to include email, calendar, 
> contacts.  It might be good to be able to sync only one aspect, or if 
> that is unrealistic, to make sure that I can access everything else 
> whilst syncing is going on -- so that if syncing takes a long time, I 
> can still be looking up contacts, emailing, etc. at the same time.
>
> As always, hope this was at least worth the time it took me to write 
> it :-)
>
> jim
>
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