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".)
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'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?
- Should "Next Month" fire at the beginning of the month, or the end?
- I'm not sure of the "Business Days" definition; is it always M-F
everywhere, and not user-customizable or localizable?
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? Or, we could have a flag that says "when showing this date,
always make it relative to the current date", but I'm not sure how that
helps the use cases Dave outlined: it'd still be relative to a hard date.
...Bryan
Mimi Yin wrote:
So, how difficult *would* it be to implement 'soft-deadlines' as a part
of assigning Custom Alarm Date?
Dave has outlined this in his write-up very succinctly...and I feel much
of Andrew's feedback is in the same vein.
How about this for an OOTB set?
+ End of Day
+ Tomorrow
+ End of Week
+ Next Week
+ This Month
+ Next Month
+ In ... ( Days / Business Days / Weeks / Months)
+ Custom Date
+ We could add these options to the alarm pulldown.
+ We could easily add (in the future) an option to 'define your own'
soft deadlines.
How would items with soft-deadlines sort in the LATER section?
Could we figure out when an item that was set for Next Week became
something for This Week and update the Date column accordingly?
Could we figure out that something with a hard deadline of this Thursday
should go in between items slated for This Week and Next Week?
Mimi
On Oct 18, 2007, at 3:57 PM, Dave Cowen wrote:
Here's what I do in real life (simplified for relative brevity): I
sort requests by "should be done by" soft deadlines. When I get a new
task, it either has a hard deadline, or I assign it a realistic soft
deadline:
1-4 hours from now
Today
Next business day
A few business days
End of this week
End of the next week
1-2 months
On Sep 25, 2007, at 9:12 PM, Andrew Tong wrote:
Reviewing the list, I change the first item to "now", followed by
changing the second item to [now] also. Since event dates are ignored
in the sort ordering, the result:
important event [tomorrow] [now]
super important event [today] [now]
To overcome this, one would have to counter-intuitively flip the 2nd
"tomorrow" item first, then you flip the more important item.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
