[Design] Undo Use Cases

[John Anderson]

As a big fan of Undo, I find that the difference between being able to 
undo any change versus just some changes has a big impact on my 
satisfaction with a product. If Undo isn't available when I need it, I'm 
less likely to go looking for it the next time I could use it.

So I think it's important to provide a simple system-wide mechanism and 
the data storage level to implement undo that makes it work for any 
operation. This also has the advantage of eliminating lots of special 
purpose coding to store the state of various commands -- which 
complicates future changes, adds extra work for every command and is 
error prone.

Mimi Yin wrote:
>
> Philippe asked us to pull together a laundry list of use cases for 
> undo. I've pulled together a first pass 
> here: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/OneDotZeroUndoProposal
>
> Please respond with your own use cases and/or anecdotes relating to 
> Undo or questions about the wiki page.
>
> Here is a high-level framing of how the use cases are organized...
>
> *Usage Patterns*
>
> Interaction Usage Patterns for Undo can be characterized in the 
> following 3 ways. I think we want to support Undo for the first two, 
> because they are relatively hard for users to restore manually through 
> the UI. However, the 3rd usage pattern is easy to undo in the UI and 
> therefore not worth supporting.
>
> 1. Spring cleaning: Moving items around. Creating new items. Filing, 
> removing, deleting, cut, copying, pasting and duplicating
>
> 2. Making targetted edits on individual items: Addressing items, 
> Editing titles, Labelling, Changing date/time information
>
> 3. Flipping switches: Stamping, marking as all-day, Never share this 
> item, Setting recurrence rule, etc
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mimi
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