| Ted and I got into a discussion about annotations and their place in Chandler items... Traditionally, annotations are thought of as a separate attribute or field on an item where users can write notes or comments. I'm wondering if we can try a more flexible notion of annotations that simply allows users to edit their items in any field. Use cases: 1. You receive an invitation for a party from your friend Janus. The party is actually being hosted by Janus and his wife Psyche. You'd like the From field to reflect that. 2. You receive a draft of a proposal via email that will be the topic of discussion for a meeting. During the meeting, you'd like to take notes on the draft, in-place in the body of the proposal. This is some of the motivation behind allowing users to edit their email, even emails that have been sent and received. Ideally, this free-form annotation and editing is supported by: 1. Ability to Edit and then Update the item (propagate changes to others via email or item sharing) 2. Ability to maintain snapshots of Updates (as part of a conversation thread) so you can look back on previous versions of the item. So an email thread might look something like this: Original: Here's a draft of the proposal... Reply: Great, I'll look at it later. Update 1: Here are my edits. Reply: Thanks, get back to you by end of today. Update 2: Incorporated your edits, I think we're close. Etc... For a more detailed write-up: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/CommunicationsDesignNew Replies and Forwards are simply treated as separate items that are part of the conversation thread. The original item + it's subsequent updates are treated as versions. So if the original item was labeled: Project Foo, then all subsequent Updates are labeled Project Foo as well, etc... We can continue further to imagine that annotations and edits could be visually distinguished (ie. highlighted) so that users can distinguish between the original text and their annotations. However, we can try out this notion of free-form annotations in a relatively low-cost way by pushing the burden of distinguishing between annotations and original text onto the user for now. (ie. Place double [[ xxx ]] around all your annotations.) What are some other low-cost ways we can experiment with annotations?...I can think of lots of high-cost ways (ie. floating stickies on the detail view ;o) Mimi |
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