Thanks for responding so quickly Bryan. See in-line:
On Oct 19, 2007, at 11:26 AM, Bryan Stearns wrote:
Mimi,
I'd need more information to be able to answer that question... I'm
not sure what you're asking for, in a couple of dimensions:
I don't understand how much dynamic behavior you're asking for...
We have to have a way to order items by an unchanging hard date &
time, and it's important that two items ordered "by date" don't
change ordering with the passage of time.
(If you want that, you'll need to specify exactly how you want the
ordering to change over time, and I'll figure out how hard that
would be. Two things that make this really hard: sharing items
between users with different timezones; performance impact of
dynamically resorting items continually. This also means: I don't
know how to decide how to order "This Week", a hard date of
Thursday, and "Next Week".)
I don't think items will re-sort continually. It's more that as time
passes, something that was tickled for Next Week, will eventually
change to be This Week (as it next week becomes this week). So what
I'm asking is, can we change the text in the Date column to say This
Week.
But if we need to display the hard-date based on the soft-name that
would be a good first pass. We could eventually enhance the UI to add
subsections in the Later section, but I won't go into detail about
that right now, because I think that's whole other Pandora's Box.
Assuming we did calculate a hard date at the point when user
chooses a soft name, adding the additional menu items to the alarm
dropdown would not be that hard. You'd just need to tell me exactly
how each choice would be turned into a hard date/time at which an
alarm would fire:
- "End of week" would turn into 5:00 PM this coming Friday, but
what if it's 5:05PM on a Friday?
I think it'd be okay to be dumb about this.
- I'm not sure when the "This Month" alarm should fire... midnight
on the last day of the month? 5:00PM on the last business day? What
if it's after 5:00PM on the last day of the month?
5:00PM on the last day. Again, I think it's okay if we're dumb about
this.
- Should "Next Month" fire at the beginning of the month, or the end?
Beginning. 8:00 AM of the 1st day if we're displaying a hard-date in
the Date column. Midnight if we're displaying soft-date.
- I'm not sure of the "Business Days" definition; is it always M-F
everywhere, and not user-customizable or localizable?
I actually think I'd like hold off on the " In ... ( Days / Business
Days / Weeks / Months)" option. There are lots of complicated issues
to resolve. For example, if I say in 4 days, do I want to see 'in 4
days'? or do I want to see 'Next Tuesday' in the Date column?
So then the first batch of options would be:
+ End of Day
+ Tomorrow
+ End of Week
+ Next Week
+ This Month
+ Next Month
+ Custom
etc.
As far as what to show in the Date column: I'm not sure exactly
what you're asking for, or how it should change over time. We could
store a flag that says "always show 'Next week' for this", but when
should that change?
I think...
Tomorrow would change to say Today at midnight.
Next Week would change to say This Week at midnight next Monday.
Next Month would change to say This Month at midnight on the 1st of
the Month.
Basically, the text would change when the hard-date tickler fires.
There's the problem of what happens when the stated time passes. Do
we say Last Week? 2 weeks ago? 3 weeks ago? 83 weeks ago?
We could probably get away with just displaying the hard-date (no
time) once the time passes.
How do we define the 'end-date/time' for these soft-dates?
+ End of Day: 5PM of Today
+ Tomorrow: Midnight day after tomorrow
+ This Week/Next Week: Midnight of Monday of the following week
+ This Month/Next Month: Midnight of the first day of the following
month
Whew. Those were good questions...
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