Hi Dennis,
The way collections work in Chandler is a bit unconventional so
here's a little bit of background to get you up to speed. I'm sure
you're not the only person who's unfamiliar with the history of the
item collection design, so thank you for bringing this up!
In Chandler, our notion of user collection is just short of
universal. If you play around with the Sidebar and App area buttons
in the Toolbar, you'll notice that the navigation is 2-dimensional.
Across the top in the Toolbar is how you control "What Kinds of
Items" you see: All Kinds, Email, Tasks, Calendar...
Down the left in the Sidebar is how you control "The Subject Matter"
of the data you see: Home stuff, Work stuff, Project Foo stuff.
We've been referring to this as the Faceted Sidebar. http://
www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=define:
+facets&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
The idea is that instead of throwing users into a soup of semantics,
we've attempted to construct a Semantic Frame of Reference. Nouns
across the top (Kinds of items OR What an item "IS"), Adjectives down
the side (Attributes or Characteristics of items).
A more concrete way to think about it is: Each user collection in the
Sidebar has a set of "Tools" Email, Task list, and Calendar.
That way, the user can either look at all their Calendars, across all
collections OR view information of all kinds relevant to a particular
collection.
For a brief presentation into the basic Information Architecture of
User Semantics in Chandler, go to http://chandler.osafoundation.org/
philosophy.php and see: The Basic Elements of Chandler
For more background research, go to http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/
view/Journal/ClassificationPaperOutline2 and see the links under
Organizational Paradigms
Thanks,
Mimi :o)
On Mar 3, 2006, at 10:25 PM, Dennis Lynch wrote:
I hope I am not adding a totally new, off-the-wall twist to the
concept of collections.. but to me, I think of things this way..
- there are some pre-defined collectiond- "email", "contacts",
"notes", "tasks", perhaps some others.
- then there are labels, which are collections.
- also, labels are all part of a pre-defined collection called
"labels" (are these are all user-defined?)
In the current design, we don't have a notion of organizing Labels
themselves beyond the pre-defined Taxonomy of Attributes: Who, What,
When, Where, Status, Value. However, it's certainly possible to
imagine expanding this Taxonomy and/or allowing users to build on it.
- then there are queries, which are collections as well
- also, queries are all part of a pre-defined collection called
"queries"
In the current design, we're not distinguishing between Label
collections and Query collections. (See my original reply to Alec's
post for a more detailed explanation.)
- of course queries can be based on virtually any attribute in the
database, including labels, collections of labels, queries, and all
the avrious intrinsic attirbutes, like date-generated, sent-from (for
emails), etc etc
- there probably should be a collection called "other" which means
"items not in a collection" <== this would help prevent items from
getting lost
The anchor collection in the Sidebar is All collection in the All app
area, which contains All content items.
Thanks for your continued efforts... anxiously awaiting the next
release.
Dennis Lynch
dmlynch [at] alum.mit [dot] edu
dmlynch1 [at] gmail [dot] com
Make email more useful by using Labels in your subject line:
IMPT- important message
INFO - general information
JOKE- self-explanatory
QRY- an unsolicited query/question
REPL- reply to your message
URGT- urgent message requiring immediate attention
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