JP wrote:
Hi,
I've recently started to use the Eclipse plugin Mylar, and it's
philosophy has stricken me as very useful for any PIM that's worth
it's salt. Sorry if you have already considered this design idea. But
I've seen just a reference to Mylar in your website, and that, only
for the interface that Mylar provides to Bugzilla and other bugs
repositories. That's IMHO the least important feature or the plugin.
So I'll elaborate a bit in case you hadn't considered it.
I've been using Mylar fairly regularly and know the creator of Mylar,
Mik Kersten, from school (we shared our graduate supervisor), so I know
a bit about the background and the internals of the project. And
although Mik has stated that he intends to apply the Mylar model to
general productivity applications, I'm not sure it translates to
Chandler that well. At least for source code editing, IIRC Mylar
basically works from the source graph (classes and methods organized in
a tree and cross-linked by "calls/is called by" and "references"
relationships). When you repeatedly visit certain elements of that graph
in the course of working on a task, a subset of nodes in the graph and
relationships to reach those nodes is given more weight, and various
heuristics applied to determine what to filter out and what to keep in
the view. These heuristics are a work in progress -- I'm sure you
noticed that what's shown is not always perfect, but it's good enough,
because the user can always use other methods of navigation in Eclipse
(e.g., Open Type, or Go to definition). So the first step would be to
try to identify whether a similar model can be found in Chandler,
because without that model there just isn't a foundation from which to
build the rest of the filtering infrastructure. (And this is without
even considering the work it would take to come up with good filtering
heuristics for PIM domain.)
Davor
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