Hi,
I thought that Chandler's repository has internally a versioning system
(a la CVS) for each item (I was talking about that with Andi a couple of
days ago, can't remember though if it's something he did or planned to
do...). Without going into the UI aspect of things, wouldn't that be
something we could leverage to provide edit versioning?
One simple UI trick would be to see the rev number of an item somewhere
in the Detail View and be able to navigate back. Styling the diff text
would provide a visual display "a la Word".
Cheers,
- Philippe
Alec Flett wrote:
Personally I think that annotations that modify existing fields is
bound to be very difficult to manage on-screen, not to mention the
technical hurdles that will be necessary to show "out of band"
information like edits...
The first thing that jumps to mind is Word's "track changes" mode -
which provides visual cues as to what has changed in the document...
screenshots attached. I've watched my wife use this system very
effectively to collaborate on documents. I think whats most
interesting about is that each change is remembered as a separate
transaction that you can accept in any order.. so if I make 4 changes
to a document, my collaborator can accept the 1st and 3rd of these
changes without affecting the rest.
I personally find the "normal" mode to be more helpful. It keeps the
changes themselves inline with visual cues in the front (color,
strikethrough). I find the "print layout" annotations a bit bothersome
because the annotations are callouts that are separated from the
actual changes.
I think a bug system like bugzilla is another interesting
collaboration tool.. (not always the most beautiful interface, but the
concepts are there) in particular:
1) the "comments" fields are constantly appended to the bug, each with
a timestamp so you can get at least some visual cue as to who and when
made what changes
2) the "View Bug Activity" (see
https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_activity.cgi?id=3968 as an
example) shows you the history of what changed.
Some have argued that these two "lists of changes" could/should be
merged - so that in between the comments, or as a part of the
comments, you'd see which fields changed.
I think that an easy, low-cost solution here is actually something
like the "notes" field in a Note... but not as its stands right now.
I've seen wikis used effectively as a way to manage a sort of thread
of conversation within a single document, but it relies on people
sharing a set of conventions within the document.
If we could formalize conventions in the UI to allow, for instance, a
log of changes within the item itself, that could be shared and
extended by sharees, then people could collaborate on a list of changes.
Alec
Mimi Yin wrote:
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
