[Dev] Chrome design follow up

[John Anderson]

Donn Denman wrote:

> Mimi and I continued the design discussion from today's meeting about 
> how the Kind Selector, Sidebar, and other Chrome views should work. We 
> settled on a feature set for the 0.5 milestone, and I /think/ it can 
> be easily be implemented with the Trees-Of-Blocks model we're 
> currently developing within CPIA. This is just a first pass, but it's 
> worth discussing.
>
> In general terms, here's what we'd like to propose: Data navigation 
> revolves around the Sidebar, which is a collection of item 
> collections. For each item collection, including the Sidebar, there 
> are four different views - applying the four Kind Filters. I think 
> this was Katie's idea in the meeting. You can think of the result as a 
> two dimensional grid with a Kind dimension across the top and a 
> Collection dimension down the side. /Each entry in the grid is a 
> separate view onto the selected item collection, whose items are 
> pre-filtered by the selected Kind/. Changes that the user makes fall 
> into two categories: changes that modify the data affect all views on 
> that collection, changes that modify the view don't affect any other 
> view.

I think a possible snag with this proposal -- if I understand it -- is 
that there currently isn't a way to filter items by a view, we can only 
filter by modifying an ItemCollection. Perhaps we could redesign 
ItemCollection/Query somehow, but making the filter part of the View 
seems difficult because it has to scale to very large lists.

>
> | All Cal Mail Task
> ------------- | ------- ------- ------ ------
> All | All Cal Mail Tasks
> Received | In E. Invites InBox Chores
> Sent | Out Events OutBox Requests
> Trash | Trash Past Es Junk, etc Done Tasks
> |
> Home | H.All H.Cal H.Mail H.Tasks
> Work | W.All W.Cal W.Mail W.Tasks
> Travel | T.All T.Cal T.Mail T.Tasks
> Kibble | K.All K.Cal K.Mail K.Tasks
> Collection | C.All C.Cal C.Mail C.Tasks
>
> Certain familiar views fall out of this model. Like the InBox of a 
> mail program - it's your received Mail. Likewise you have pre-built 
> views for your home and work calendars, by selecting the Cal kind and 
> the Home or Work collection. To see both calendars at once, you must 
> select the All collection, and then you get all Calendar items.
>
> We've made some simplifications for 0.5.
> 1) The kind filter is not changeable. If you want to do your own 
> special filtering, you should start with the All Kind and edit the 
> query from there.
> 2) There's no layout selector - the layout is based on kind, with 
> Calendar showing a graphical view, everything else showing a table view.
> 3) No multiple selection will be supported for either kinds or 
> collections.
> 4) Each grid cell has its own independent view.
>
> Each dimension is open for expansion: The user can create new Item 
> Collections, which appear on the sidebar. Four pre-filtered Views are 
> created for the user collection as needed. In theory, a 3rd party 
> parcel such as Photos, could be written which adds another Kind to the 
> toolbar. Then a photo-filtered view would be created for the sidebar 
> and when needed for each Item collection.
>
> Complications: The Tab views complicate the picture a little, but 
> basically work the way they do today. Also, Mimi thinks there needs to 
> be some sharing between views vertically, but hasn't got that all 
> figured out, so we'll defer that till the next cycle.
>
> I think this design could work pretty well. Do people see major 
> issues? Does this make sense?
>
> - Donn Denman
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
>
>Open Source Applications Foundation "Dev" mailing list
>http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>  
>