[Design] Answers to Questions from Dashboard Spec Review

[Mimi Yin]

Hi Bryan,

I think the way I'm imagining this will work is:

Let's say rows 1-10 are selected.

If you click on a widget in a row that is currently selected (e.g.  
row 3), then that click will apply to all selected rows.

If you click on a widget in a row that is not currently selected  
(e.g. row 12), then that click only applies to that row (12). The  
click does not change the current selection (rows 1-10).

This is detailed in the revised spec.

Again, this is not a requirement for Alpha 4. For Alpha 4, we can  
just do what you describe in the 1st scenario.

Mimi


>> 8. If multiple Items are selected in the table and the user clicks  
>> on a widget in the table, does the click apply to all selected Items?
>> Yes. Triaging multiple items at a time will be a key feature.  
>> However, it is not important to have in the short-term. If and  
>> when users are using Chandler so heavily that they desire such a  
>> feature, it will be a nice problem to have :o)
> This sounds like the behavior is supposed to be "clicking in a  
> widget affects all selected rows", but what if the row clicked in  
> isn't selected? Does the selection change to be that row? Does the  
> first click count?
>
> I can imagine two different but consistent mechanisms:
> - Clicking in widgets is completely independent of selection; thus,  
> clicking in a widget only affects the row you clicked in, and  
> doesn't change the selection. With this scheme, you couldn't use  
> the widgets to change multiple rows. This is the way Thunderbird's  
> read/unread column works, though.
>
> - Clicking in widgets is secondary to selection; clicking in an  
> unselected row selects it (whether you click in a widget's cell or  
> elsewhere in the row), at which point the widgets start listening  
> for clicks. If multiple rows are selected, any rows whose value  
> matches the clicked one gets changed (I think this is an  
> explainable way of dealing with a selection whose widget states are  
> different: if you've got three items selected whose communications  
> states are "unread", "unread", and "needs reply", and you click on  
> one of the "unreads", both "unreads" advance to "read"'; clicking  
> the same widget again would advance both "reads" to "needs reply",  
> and clicking a third time would advance all three to  
> "unread" (since they'd all be "needs reply" when that third click  
> came).
>
> If you intend it to work one of these ways, great (it works the  
> first way now, and could be made to work the other way pretty  
> easily). If you want it to work a different way, can you please  
> give a few examples of how multiple selection and clicking in  
> widgets interact to get the behavior you want?
>
> ...Bryan