On Nov 4, 2006, at 2:46 PM, Mimi Yin wrote:
My bad, I kept going on the bug when I should have been posting comments to the list ;o)
In reply to Brian's comment below, the proposal I put forth in the bug would unify 'Go offline' for sharing and email by allowing the user to essentially suspend syncing of all shares. I think unless we can unify these concepts for Preview, my sense is that it will be too confusing to make 'Go offline' for email available for the end-user. However, we can certainly keep it in the Test menu for developers.
Hi Mimi,
I think it is worth taking a bit of time to get this right for preview. I agree that we want a unified concept of go online / go offline. It would make no sense to me to have the ability to take email offline while sharing is still online. It should be one action for Preview where go offline takes everything offline. That is the easiest concept for users to understand and is also the easiest task to accomplish from a development standpoint. It is also the origins of bug 6553 where developers wanted the ability to test Chandler without network operations via a --offline flag. If based on user feedback something more complex is desired then we can revise for Chandler 1.0.
It seems to me the concept we have for Sharing of taking specific collections on or off line may be the wrong terminology and thus refining will make this decision clearer.
When selecting a collection for sharing there is the take online / offline toggle menu item. But really what one is saying is no longer sync this specific collection. Yes the collection is 'offline', but the rest of the app is online which I think is a confusing concept for novice computer users. By changing the sharing verbiage to better reflect what is happening it may clear up the offline / online discussion.
We are not taking sharing offline but are telling the sharing service to not sync a specific share. Again, the rest of sharing is online as are the other Chandler network services. Instead, the wording could be something like "Disable syncing of 'In' collection' and 'Enable syncing of 'In' collection'.
Changing this wording paves the way for the addition of a 'Go Offline' File menu item that takes the entire app (email, sharing, rss, etc) offline.
That's my two cents :)
-Brian
Yes, but in Chandler the mental model we're trying to promote is that Sharing
is all things Communications and agnostic to protocol. Sharing includes:
IMAP, POP, WebDAV, CalDAV, RSS and eventually IM, SMS, VoIP etc.
If we have a single 'Go offline' menu that includes email and sharing, I think
it be confusing to have it under the File menurather than the Share menu.
Especially because all the Sync related stuff for both Email and Sharing are
under the Share menu.
I think the key issue is not which menu header to place the offline toggle
under but how will the toggle work. Right now the online / offline toggle is
very specific to sharing of individual collections. As stated earlier this is
not the right model for mail or RSS or VOIP or any of the other sharing
protocols outside of CalDAV / WebDAV.
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