Last week Mimi and I talked about ways to streamline the process of hooking Chandler up to collections the user has previously published to their Cosmo account. A couple example scenarios are:
1) Someone has two Chandlers running, and wants collections that were published from one Chandler to appear in the other automatically 2) Someone is reinstalling Chandler and has collections on the server they want to sync In either case the user could use the Tools > Save and Restore > Restore Published Shares menu item, but it might be nicer to automate the procedure a bit. The questions are: how automatic do we want it to be, and at what time(s) should Chandler query the server to look for collections we own on the server? I usually have one or two test collections on the hub that I don't normally want to appear in Chandler, but we could call that a corner case (I could always create a separate server account to own these test collections). Do we want the user to be able to select which collections get restored (like the Restore Published Shares dialog does today)? Or should Chandler just restore all the collections their server account owns? Should there be any indicator in the UI that the restore process is happening, or should it be all in the background? If in the background, where do I display errors, and will the user be surprised to see collections suddenly appearing in the sidebar? I suppose that could be a pleasant surprise. :-) Next, how should the restoration be triggered? We could add a button to the account dialog, or perhaps we trigger it when the accounts dialog is closed. I suppose the restoration process could take place at the beginning of each sync. Anyway, those are quite a few questions for one email, and I'll let Mimi ponder those. :-) After typing all this up, I guess my feeling is this should all be as transparent as possible, ideally with no additional UI to hook up Chandler to existing published shares. The best bet would would probably be to have the process take place at each sync so the user doesn't have to do anything special to trigger it. ~morgen _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
