[Design] [D/f]How do I group events?

[Mimi Yin]

"It was easy to create new events in the calendar by dragging and  
dropping, but it was not immediately obvious how to create new  
categories of event that are represented by different colors, which  
is a simple process in iCal."

This quote is taken from the ill-fated and factually inaccurate ars  
technica article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 
20060113-5977.html

(For more context on this article see Ted's blog entry: http:// 
wp.osafoundation.org/2006/01/13/setting-the-record-straight.)

Nevertheless, this piece of feedback is still interesting because  
many calendar apps (Outlook, Entourage, Palm) have a model for  
grouping calendar events that is:

+ bottom-up: assign a category/color to an event, as opposed to...

+ top-down: create a new container and put events into it

It may not occur to many users to try and create "extra" calendars in  
the sidebar to group events (even though this is standard practice  
for email).

iCal gets around this by shipping out of the box with 2 calendars:  
Home and Work + they have a big fat [+] button at the bottom of the  
sidebar.

It is also possible that as Chandler becomes more of a "cross-app"  
app, the idea of creating "top-down" collections of items as a  
generic way to group items will neutralize the "set a category"  
mental model people bring from other calendaring apps.

Mimi
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