It seems like there are an increasing number of "experimental UI"
items we might have for 0.7...
+ Activity log
+ Sharing log
+ Free-busy views
Perhaps we should consider a "Sandbox" area in a separate pane in the
sidebar (ie. toggling with the mini-calendar) that could be invoked
from a menu item.
Could the sharing log be merged with a general activity log?
Some more questions in-line:
On Jan 30, 2006, at 9:14 PM, Morgen Sagen wrote:
I'm currently scoping out the following projects for 0.7:
A) Background synchronization (let the user continue to use
Chandler while syncing)
B) User Notification framework (provide the user some way to see
that shared items have been changed)
C) Conflict resolution (let the user manually reconcile
conflicting changes that have been synced)
Below is a brief description of each, including areas in which I
would need help from other groups (Andi with some repository work,
and the Apps team for some CPIA work). Comments are welcome.
(A) Background (or "asynchronous") syncing involves moving the
current sharing operations into their own thread rather than
blocking the main UI thread as they do today. The difficulty here
will mostly be in the repository view merging code, since using a
different thread requires using a different repository view. I
expect I will need some amount of Andi's time to work through view
merging issues, and we'll need some way in CPIA to indicate
(probably via some animated icon) that a collection is currently
being synced. Grant has already done an experiment with moving
sharing to its own thread, and I will incorporate that work soon.
Some details to be worked out here include what happens if the user
is in the middle of editing an item that is modified by a
background sync.
(B) User Notifications: I'm not sure if I'm talking about what has
been referred to as "big-N Notifications", but clearly what is
needed for sharing is some way for the user to see a log of changes
that happened as a result of syncing. Currently you can see such
changes flash by quickly in the Sync dialog, but Mitch proposed the
idea of having a sidebar collection which acts much like an RSS
feed of changes. We could add a new Kind to the domain model named
"UserNotification" (or some name to distinguish it from any
internal notifications). Changes made in the background during
syncing would get a corresponding UserNotification item added to
the Changes collection. The user could then, at their leisure,
scan through the changes via the list view of that Changes
collection, and either mark each UserNotification as "read" or else
delete the UserNotification item. This same mechanism could be
used not just for sharing-related changes, but for any kind of
thing that needs to be brought to the user's attention in a non-
immediate manner. These UserNotifications could be fed into a
single collection, or multiple collections, depending on
preference. This requires from CPIA: (1) a way to sort the list
view, and (2) some sort of 'mark as read' facility.
(C) Conflict Resolution: In 0.6, when two people change the same
attribute on the same shared item and synchronize, the first one to
sync wins. The second user gets a notification of the conflict in
the Sync dialog, but their local change is lost, overwritten by
what the first user assigned. There are a few approaches we could
take to provide better conflict resolution: (1) Quarantine all
background sharing changes until the user is at a point where they
are ready to incorporate all of those changes. The user is then
presented with each conflict (either one-by-one or altogether) and
they choose from either the local change or the remote change. All
conflicts would have to be resolved at this point, otherwise the
repository could not continue with the repository view "refresh".
(2) Pick an automatic conflict resolution policy ('local changes
win' versus 'remote changes win') and when a conflict happens
follow that policy, but in addition add a special kind of
UserNotification ("ConflictNotification"?) item to the Changes/
Notification log collection, recording in it which Item/attribute
had the conflict, and what the two attribute values were. I prefer
(2); this would allow sharing-related changes to appear at any time
(since from the repository's standpoint, conflicts are resolved
immediately), and allow the user to review/resolve conflicts at
their leisure. Ideally reviewing a conflict would mean clicking on
a ConflictNotification item in the list view and being presented in
the detail view with a side-by-side comparison of an item -- local
changes next to remote changes -- and buttons allowing the user to
pick between the two. This project would require some CPIA work
for presenting a conflict resolution detail view.
Would you be able to view 2 conflicting versions of the same item as
individual items in the detail view?
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