[Design] MailTags

[Alec Flett]

Mimi Yin wrote:
> However, I think the drop-down is still somewhat labor-intensive and 
> there isn't an easy way to define new Gmail labels. Also, all labels 
> automatically end up in your sidebar, which tends to discourage people 
> from labeling, lest it makes their sidebar navigation un-usably 
> overcrowded.
>
I'm not a big GMail user but I do use Picasa pretty heavily. I also use 
del.icio.us and have a strong bias towards its approach to tagging.

I'm not convinced that the sidebar in GMail discourages people from 
labeling - I'm merely guessing but I suspect that what it does is work 
very well for a while, when you have just a few tags, and then slowly 
becomes unwieldy. But since GMail doesn't provide an easy way to create 
new tags like delicious does, I think it slows down the rate of tag 
creation so that you have to spend more time thinking about what your 
tag will be called. Interestingly, they use the identical approach in 
Picasa. That said as a regular del.icio.us user, it drives me nuts how 
hard it is to create tags. So in Picasa, I have about 9 tags/labels for 
a a few thousand pictures.

Delicious has taken a novel approach in its "cloud" view by messing with 
fonts in the tag list to show you what tags are more used than others. 
(The more-used are more bold/big/etc) Its not the best solution, but it 
works fairly well - at least I use delicious fairly often and can 
usually navigate the tags to find what I'm looking for in 1-2 clicks. I 
have well over 300 tags there for about 150 bookmarks. 
http://del.icio.us/alecf/

So basically this boils down to:
1) Delicious makes it really easy to create tags, which encourages your 
taglist to get huge. However, it does some autocompletion to make it 
easy to find existing tags as well. It tries to mitigate the sea of tags 
that you create by providing an innovative way to browse by tag. 
Delicious generally cover a smallish number of items, each of which are 
very distinct (i.e. a small enough number that I assign tags to them on 
an individual basis)

2) GMail/Picasa/etc provides a fairly easy way to assign existing tags, 
but the assignment only works well when there are a few tags - i.e. once 
you have more than a dozen or so tags the combo box itself can get 
pretty unwieldy. Creating new tags is not easy though, so this greatly 
reduces the number of tags you create. There tend to be many more 
"items" in GMail/Picasa and they tend to be closely related to each 
other - i.e. I might have 100 pictures of just one event, or 100 e-mail 
messages on one topic, in a sea of thousands of pictures or e-mail messages.

Personally what I'd like to see in Chandler is:
1) delicious-style tagging in the detail view - just a textbox where you 
type your tags, with auto-completion.
2) delicious/picasa-style tagging where you can select a whole bunch of 
items and say "assign this existing tag"

I think that #2 might be the best use of the "combined" detail view for 
multiple items that I've seen to date. It would be neat if I could 
select 100 items, and the detail view would show a "Tags:" field where I 
could see the tags that are shared between all those items. Then I could 
add a new tag to all of them just by typing.

Alec

Alec

> Mimi
>
> On Jan 11, 2006, at 12:10 PM, Ted Leung wrote:
>
>> So in today's IRC office hour 
>> <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/script/getIrcTranscript.cgi?date=20060111> 
>> there was a side discussion about tagging mail.   There is a plugin 
>> MailTags <http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html>, for OS X's Mail.app 
>> that allows you to locally tag messages, and then search, create 
>> smart mailboxes, etc based on tags.  Unfortunately, it does not 
>> propagate those tags into sent messages, so you can't tag messages 
>> for someone else.
>>
>> Mimi commented that it made her crazy, and several people were 
>> interested in hearing her reasoning, etc.  So this message is a place 
>> to hang that thread.
>>
>> ----
>> Ted Leung                 Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
>> PGP Fingerprint: 1003 7870 251F FA71 A59A  CEE3 BEBA 2B87 F5FC 4B42
>>
>>
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