Hi Philippe,
I think you're working off of what's currently in Alpha 5, rather
than the wiki spec?
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/
UnifiedDataInAndOutProposal
Katie's not quite done with bug 5236.
https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5236
But I agree, how we should go about organizing the menu items is not
clear cut and I can see a number of ways in which we could go about
it for Preview. I think anything we do will be experimental and
elicit healthy dogfood feedback :o)
More inline...
On Jan 11, 2007, at 11:50 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Hi,
I wanted to know if I'm the only one confused by the new "Share"
menu and how things migrated from "Collection" to "Share". Some
question to the design team:
- I think the distinction between a shared collection and a
collection subscribed read/write is lost on the user at the UI
level at least. OK, the first one is in your Cosmo account while
the other is someone else's account but, apart from that, is there
any other difference? Does it warrant to have 2 different menu
items to "Unsubscribe/Unpublish" them (they are mutually
exclusive)? FWIW, the effect of Unsubscribe and Unpublish is
essentially the same for the user (keep a version of the collection
local, don't sync anymore)
Yes, agreed. We should have:
Subscribe...
Publish...
Unsubscribe / Unpublish
Well, for Unpublish, the user is actually deleting it off the server,
thereby making it impossible for the sharees to share as well. I
think that is a significant difference, but that shouldn't prevent us
from consolidating these menu items.
- I know that we resisted using "Publish" in favor of "Share" as a
verb (though you can push something to Cosmo without sharing it
with anyone...). But why then is the opposite action of "Share"
named "Unpublish"?
The wiki spec addresses this issue I believe. We use:
Publish, Unpublish, Subscribe and Unsubscribe. The only place we use
share is 'Sync shares'... which applies to both subscriptions and
Published shares. (See below about 'Manage share').
- I feel very confusing to have the "Sync All" actions under the
"Share" menu, especially wrt to email. That's not where I
instinctively looked for it. It was under "Collection" before (not
great either). May be those "global network actions" should be
under "File" (sort of a catch all menu).
Would we remove all Sync from the Share menu? I think that might be
kind of weird too. For Preview especially, we're really trying to
establish a mental model where email is just another sharing/
transport mechanism. One that is useful for item-sharing and sending
Update notifications.
I mean if you really think about it, File... as a menu title is
pretty nonsensical at this point too. The actual repository 'Files'
in Chandler are totally invisible to the user. All the user knows is
that there's an App Chandler and it has collections and items. None
of these are actually Files that they open, close, delete or do
anything with.
So, that's a long way of saying that shoe-horning newer models into
old menu systems is not exactly ideal either and I'd like to give our
'new model' a try and then fine-tune the menu based on dogfood
feedback. I absolutely believe that there will be many who will
expect 'Sync all' functionality to live in the 'File' menu. However,
the real test will be whether those users eventually find the
features they need either on the toolbar or under the 'Share' menu.
It's also probably safe to say that for every user that knows that
'Sync' should live under File, there are many, many more users who
have no idea where features like Sync should and shouldn't live.
- "Take offline" really confused me. I though is was a sort of
"unpublish" at first. I mean, taking something offline usually
means taking it out of a server, not suspending communication
entirely. Or may be the thinking was about the machine (as in "take
this machine offline"). Having this under Share though didn't help.
Renaming it "Go offline" seems less ambiguous (especially since it
applies to other things than collection sharing)
Agreed :o) I believe it's Go offline on the wiki spec.
- The use of separators feels a little arbitrary. e.g., under the
Collection menu, why is "rename" grouped with "new" and separated
from "collection color"? Looks like "rename" and "collection color"
are of the same level (change attributes of the currently active
collection), while "new" is clearly a generic action.
There are still a number of things missing in the Collection menu,
namely: Duplicate, Delete, and Empty Trash
In that context, I think separating Color makes more sense. On a side
note: I think we should also rename the menu item to Calendar color,
at least until we get Table overlays working :o)
To cut through the chase, here's my proposal:
Collection:
New Collection
Subscribe...
------
Rename
Change color
Add <collection> to Dashboard
Notes:
- Separate generic from actions that apply to the active collection
I reworked the Item and Collection menus to adhere to this as much as
possible. However there are just some funny cases that make it hard
to follow it to a T, I think. For example, We probably don't want
Empty Trash to sit right underneath 'New' collection, apart from
'Delete' collection. In the 'Share' menu, it would be weird to have
Subscribe be separated from 'Publish' and 'Unsubscribe', or to group
'Sync' with 'Publish', 'Unpublish/Unsubscribe', while 'Subscribe'
sits separate.
There are clearly many ways to categorize the menu items and I'm
wondering if 'general actions' versus 'actions that apply to the
selected item/collection' is a distinction that will be lost on the
user?
- "Subscribe" seems better suited here than under "Share" since
it's creating a collection locally. After all, it's not shared as
long as it's not even subscribed...
I'm not sure about this. We got dogfood feedback that when
subscribing, users were looking for a menu that said something
specific about 'Sharing'.
- Use action verb for color ("Change") instead of substantive
("Collection color")
Unless we get feedback that users are confused, I'm not sure we need
the extra verbiage. We haven't been sticklers about action words.
e.g. New item and New collection.
Share:
Share <collection>
Unsubscribe/Unpublish <collection>
Sync <collection>
Manage <collection>
Copy sharing ticket(s) to Clipboard
------
Restore published shares...
I think we should remove this to the Test or Exp menus. With Dump and
Reload, we shouldn't need this anymore?
Freebusy
Notes:
- Separate actions that apply to the active collection from actions
that apply to the user's whole set of collections
- One single menu item for Unpublish/Unsubscribe
Agreed. Fixed on the wiki spec.
- Use "sharing ticket" instead of "URL" (though we might trade a
jargonic term for another, at least it sort of hint at what this
URL will do...)
Yup, fixed on the wiki spec. Oh but we'll need to change this in a
number of places. In the Publish and Subscribe dialogs, all over
Cosmo as well. Will that be a fair amount of work to do?
- Use the name of the collection instead of "Share" in the "Manage"
item (that applies only to the active collection)
Ahh, good idea. Fixed on the wiki spec.
- Assumes "Sync all", "Go offline" and "Set Auto-sync intervals..."
are moved to the File menu
I think it will feel strange to separate 'Sync all' from 'Sync' an
individual collection.
Cheers,
- Philippe
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