I can see where you're coming from. Few serious calendar users will want to
create a Cosmo calendar from scratch. Chandler users will have their
Chandler users already published to Cosmo. And Casual Collaborators are
mostly concerned with other people's calendars or group calendars. So why
have an out of the box (OOTB) 'personal' calendar'?

Let's look at the specific usage scenarios for 0.6 and Preview:

1. Signing up for an account to manage their subscriptions to other people's
or group calendars and does not have a calendar of their own to
import/subscribe to in Cosmo. This is what we think will be the case for the
Casual Collaborator. In that case, I think we should provide the user with a
Calendar out of the box, because all of the calendars they have in Cosmo
will be other people's and if we are looking to persuade them to try
managing their own calendar in Cosmo, a separate 'personal' calendar OOTB
will help our cause.

2. A Chandler user who has published collections on Cosmo and knows that
they can see the calendars they published in a browser via the Cosmo web
app. This person does *not* need to have an OOTB Calendar. In fact, that
would be actively confusing because we don't really have a notion of
repository sync between Cosmo and Chandler and events the user adds to the
Cosmo Calendar won't show up in Chandler. However, since the Chandler user
is not the target user for 0.6 or Preview, we can probably live with this
confusion for now.

3. Someone checking out Cosmo to play with it. (They'll need a Calendar OOTB
to do that.)

4. Someone wanting to try out Cosmo as a standalone Calendar app. Currently,
there isn't end-user UI for importing calendars. Creating a calendar from
scratch or Publishing a calendar onto Cosmo from a 3rd party Calendar client
are the only 2 options. If there was an import tool, we could/should give
users an option to either import calendars as new collections, or import
them into the default Cosmo Calendar.

In 3 of the 4 cases above, having a Calendar out of the box makes sense. In
the 1 case where it doesn't make sense, we should either auto-detect that
the user is a Chandler-Publisher and get rid of the OOTB collection, or just
deal with the funny-ness until we can implement a Dashboard / Library
collection.

The way I see it, in the Preview timeframe, 1 (CC) and 3 (Checking out
Cosmo) are the ones we really need to get right. 2 (Consultative Chandler
user) needs to be stable and nominally useful, but it's okay if it's a
little bit confusing so long as 'users in the know' can figure out how to
work around the lack of a 'repository sync' construct in the end-user mental
model. 4 (Standalone calendar user) is a nice to have user, but we haven't
spent nearly enough time flushing out scenarios and workflows to make it
something we can realistically target for Preview.

So, given the usage scenarios, does an OOTB calendar make more sense?

Mimi
On 1/4/07, Matthew Eernisse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Brian Moseley wrote:
> i've always thought that "Cosmo" collection was a little bogus. i feel
> like the user, upon logging in for the first time, should see a page
> that says "you have no collections. you should share one with
> chandler, or add somebody else's shared collection, or import a
> calendar from another application, or make a new empty collection".

+1 -- great idea, definitely better than the magic, behind-the-scenes
creation we have going now.

Maybe add something like "If you're not sure what to do, just create an
empty collection to start with -- you can do any of those other things
later on."


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