| I missed doing a summary last week so this is for the previous 2 weeks. New Threads: Mimi forwarded a private email on Regular expressions for date/time widget. She and Darshana put together a laundry list of regular expressions handled by the new date/time Natural Language Processor on the following wiki page http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/DateTimeParsing. Mimi also listed them at length in the email. John forwarded a thread about New Sidebar Problems. After working on the sidebar spec for several weeks he has run into a few snags. + There is some ambiguity around context of the focus and operations since we actually now have 2 separate sidebars sections - OOTB and user-defined collections. When you do things, which section do they operate on. + Mimi clarified that from a user perspective we shouldn't know about 2 sidebars. The focus is rarely in the sidebar which should help the confusion and we have separate menu items for manipulating collections (enabled/disabled based on context). We can also only select one collection at a time so there is no confusing over selecting both a OOTB collection and a user-defined collection. + Bryan Stearns thought that perhaps the difficulty is because we decided to have 2 distinct sidebars for these 2 areas. The design certainly doesn't require this and made a couple of alternative suggestions. Mimi posted about Collecting User Data from Dogfooders and sent instructions on how to turn on the logging parcel that Ashkan wrote this summer. She urged people to consider upgrading to the latest build and turning on this feature so that the design team can gather some valuable information to understand user patterns and behavior. Ernesto has completed his SoC project and sent along links to his Address Book project documentation. Priscilla summarized a discussion on Fonts for Cosmo (Web) UI. Based on Matthew concerns around how to maintain different stylesheets for each OS, they came up with a proposal which involves only one stylesheet and use fallbacks in the font declaration allow us to have options when a font is not supported on a particular platform. Mimi forwarded a link to a Cosmo thread letting people know about a Cosmo Target User discussion on Cosmo-dev. Philippe forwarded a summary of some Dogfood feedback he received from the interns. Highlights that were mentioned... + Performance + Documentation + Calendar month view + Scripting Rick Davis sent an email with a few questions including one about month view. + How do search the archives + Is there a month view in the plan + He tried to import a US32Holidays.ics calendar and the holidays seem to be on random days. Jeffrey responded. It looks as though there is a bug with the US holidays calendar. Month view is on the schedule for post Preview and he had a suggestion for search. Marco Loregian also forwarded an email with several questions including one about calendar colors. + He had published his mac calendar on Cosmo Demo to view in Chandler. He asked about having write mode. + He also asked about preserving the same colors. + Wanted a more prominent display for which calendar an event belongs to - other than the detail view. + Morgen responded that iCal doesn't support bi-directional sharing. + Jeffrey also responded with some clarification on overlays etc and how the lozenge swatches work. We held a design session on Sept 5th to discuss the Cosmo wish list that we drafted during the sprint. Notes and next actions here. Heikki posted a thread for Dashboard confusing, don't know how to get calendar view. + He was confused because he went to the Calendar app area and selected the Dashboard and saw only a table view. He didn't realize that he had to create a new collection to see a calendar view. He expressed concern that we would change the view type in the Calendar app area depending on the type of collection you have selected. + A couple of others expressed confusion while others thought the model was correct. + There was a bunch of discussion with a few important take aways... + The dashboard isn't done yet so there were a few key affordances missing that were contributing to the confusion + ie: We will actually ship with 2 default calendars - home/work + There was agreement that giving the user a view selector would be the optimal solution but the PPD team is concerned about adding features to the plan for Preview when we should be focussing on cutting what is not absolutely necessary. We think we can live without this. + Once we have the dashboard more fully complete, we will re-evaluate. Mimi started the first of several related threads dealing with sidebar issues. The first one deals with Overlays inconsistent across App Areas. + To summarize a lengthy email, it really involves a decision of whether or not we turn off overlays when we are not displaying calendars. + Getting the overlays to work in the table is considerable work that we probably don't have time for. + There is some inconsistency for the user however and there was concern from the developers. + From a design perspective we could try some visual feedback to let the user know overlays are not available. + Next Actions: We are not going to support table overlays for now. The developers still feel that we may have time for this so we will see where we are in Alpha6 and re-evaluate understanding that there may be higher priorities. The second sidebar thread addresses Sidebar collection overlay icon interaction issues. This gets into all the various selection states for the overlay icons (mouse down, mouse over etc). Most of this is dialog between Mimi and John and the user is not necessarily aware of all these subtleties. There was actually a follow-up meeting on this where we made 2 decisions worth noting. + Mimi and John agreed to a new interaction behavior for the sidebar collection overlay icons. We will go with 6 interaction states and 2 deactivated states. + When we move from the user-defined collections area to the OOTB collections area in the sidebar, we are going to grey out all collection icons in the user-defined area regardless of state (checked or unchecked). This is to make it visually obvious that moving to the OOTB area turns off overlay support. Once the user clicks back they see whatever was activated before. Mimi started a new thread on Setting up special stamping IMAP Folders. + Mimi and Sheila had a brief meeting with Brian Kirsch to discuss the options and user workflow for subscribing to an iMap folder (one of our Preview goals) and handling special Chandler headers. + Mimi and Brian worked out a proposal for something relatively easy and doable for Preview. + When users setup their iMap accounts in Chandler, they are presented with the option to add a set of special folders in which they can put the emails they want to see in Chandler. We would handle 3 separate folders for Mail, Tasks and Events. There is a link in the thread to some proposed mockups. + Brian Kirsch replied with some additional points http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-September/005382.html Jeffrey sent an email about Recurrence, table view, and triage status. Currently in the table view, we do not see individual recurrences of events. We only see the master one. If users want to triage recurring events, what does this mean and what should they see in the table view. If a user changes the triage status of an recurring event in the detail view - what happens? + Philippe: If we change the triage status in the detail view shouldn't we just prompt like we do for any other change - This, All, All future. + It's difficult to change to code to have multiple individual occurrences appear in the table view but it seems likely that people will want to see the upcoming events. + Sheila: This discussion is still ongoing and will be further summarized in next week's summary. In the include @time/anytime events in preview pane thread, Jeffrey and Mimi proposed that we keep displaying @time and anytime events in the preview area but remove these from the busy bars. Philippe started a lengthy thread on default TZ and interop. Since we use the default of floating TZ if you DON'T have timezones turned on in the app, he feels it causes some problems. + He received an event and didn't see it on his calendar because it was displayed using it's raw GMT time making it 8 hours ahead (of the time he expected) and he thought there was a bug with the calendar. + He proposed that when TZ are not turned on in the app, we use the system timezone not floating. + This is a lengthy thread I have decided to do a separate summary by the end of the week. Continued Discussions: Priscilla chimed in on the Anonymous login with Ticket + Password discussion. + She prefers giving the user an option to force users to have accounts for accountability rather than the password solution. She feels this is more along the path of having an ACL solution. + There was much back and forth about whether we could store the password once the user signed up for an account. + All the rest of the discussion is moot at this stage since we decided to NOT implement the optional password option and stick with the way we use tickets today. We didn't really manage to address the concerns about security and working on a better ACL solution for post-"Preview" seems like a better use of time. + Last call from Sheila : http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-September/005359.html Davor replied to John's last post about the Undo Use Cases. He agreed with John that an application needs to have some reasonable Undo support for usability Grant replied to an old thread on the Help menu supporting a proposal to point to the Chandler FAQ on the wiki. + Brian Kirsch pointed out that once we ship localized versions, we will want to have help documentation shipped with the release in a particular language - not point to wiki content. Other Stuff: Ted forwarded a blog post on "The Real Reason Designers don't contribute to open source" Philippe found an old blog with a Outlook 2007 wish list from Omar Shahine "Omar's Wish List". http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-August/005327.html Ted posted a link for another GTD app for the Mac. |
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