[Design] [Proposal] [Desktop] [Cosmo] Addressing 'How do I get started?' issues

[Mimi Yin]

Hi Davor,

In my mind, items can still belong to multiple clusters. You can  
select items 1,3,5,7 and make that a cluster. And then you can select  
3,6,9,12 and make that a cluster and 3 belongs in both clusters.

When you select 3, a nice to have would be to have the 2 clusters  
show up highlighted in different colors.

As for projects in the sidebar, what feels wrong to be about that is  
that projects are ephemeral, they come and go. Whereas, generally  
speaking, sidebar items stick around for a long time. Projects also  
need 'focus' management, aka triage. My feeling is that it would be  
hard to manipulate what projects you wanted to focus on within the  
confines of a hierarchy. You might be 'making progress' on a dozen  
projects at any given time, which dozen depends on timing, outside  
circumstances. Mixed in there might be meetings you need to attend  
and ideas you need to follow up on.

I don't disagree that some 'Chandler-esque' form of hierarchy in the  
sidebar would be useful. For example I have 12 persistent areas of  
responsibility (collections) in the sidebar that would be much better  
organized if I could group them into 3 'spheres'. But I think that's  
a separate thing from projects.

Mimi

On Dec 1, 2007, at 10:03 PM, Davor Cubranic wrote:

> Hi Mimi,
>
> I like your ideas for light-weight "clusters" by highlighting related
> items (like in Apple Mail) very much. One additional UI improvement
> would be to have a "quick navigation" key shortcut to jump to the
> next/previous linked item.
>
> But your proposal for clustering also means that there is only one  
> axis
> of grouping, i.e., that an item can exist only in a single cluster  
> at a
> given time. Which, in my mind, is a step backward from the flexibility
> afforded by collections, although I don't have a better solution
> myself.
>
> This brings me to my other point: I also fear that if you try to
> present "collections" as "workspaces" and advocate project  
> workflows as
> below, one of the neatest features of collections will get overlooked:
> that an item can exist in multiple collections at the same time.
>
> Perhaps one way to handle the problem of not having enough space in  
> the
> sidebar for all the collections is by having a way to not always show
> all collections within it. For example, what if the collections were
> hierarchical? This way once could have 5-6 top level collections,  
> which
> is about the limit that I find fits comfortably, and open or collapse
> those nodes as needed. Alternatively, maybe we can have "app areas"
> hold different subsets of collections. These areas wouldn't be divided
> by the item type as they are today, but be used more like  
> "workspaces",
> so I could have, say, the "Contexts" workspace and the "Home projects"
> workspace, etc.
>
> Davor
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