On Wed, 5 Sep 2007 17:16:16 -0700, "Mimi Yin"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> Hi Aparna,
>
> When you fill out your IMAP account info in your mail client. All your
> IMAP folders and messages get synced automatically.
>
> You can think of Chandler Hub accounts in the same way. When you set
> up a Chandler Hub account, we can automatically kick off re-setting up
> all the collections you've published to Chandler Hub in Chandler
> Desktop.
>
> We could pop-up the dialog that lets you choose what collections you
> want to sync to Chandler Desktop, but I'm not even sure that's
> necessary.
>
> Mimi
>
Hi, Apologies for my not engaging earlier in this thread. After a bit of
time with the new "Automatically Restored Published Shares" feature, I
have some feedback. It's only somewhat nice that it's automatic, and
it's a little too automatic from my perspective. To review, the current
implementation begins to restore ones published shares immediately after
one clicks the OK button to close the Accounts dialog (after having
entered username and password info for a Chandler Hub account). There is
no warning that this is what will happen, and no option to cancel the
operation. Given the process intensity of the restore, Chandler becomes
very sluggish if responsive at all. This could be alarming or confusing
at best for users. Clues that a sync is occurring include (on Windows
XP) the processor jumping to 100% (with the familiar whirring of the
laptop processor cooling fan), and eventually in the sidebar, the
appearance of a familiar collection underneath the OOTB collections.

I appreciate the good intentions, but this new implementation is a
significant loss in flexibility for the user from the previous
implementation. At a minimum, it would be very helpful if the user would
be prompted [Ok][Cancel] about whether to proceed with the restore. And,
if the user proceeds with the restore, it would be very helpful to have
presented next the list of published shares that are available to
restore. Perhaps an "All Shares" checkbox could be added to this dialog
to streamline the path for those who really want all published shares
restored right then.

I typically do not want all my published shares on the Hub to be
restored to every other computer on which I install Chandler. For
example, on some computers, I want only certain collections that
primarily contain events like family and school calendars. Often, I just
don't need all of the collections restored, and (if I already have my
Venti Gold Coast) would rather not wait while 15-20 collections restored
before being able to proceed. Other times, for dogfooding, I would like
to try and reproduce a bug with a collection or two that I would be able
to share in a repository snapshot should I succeed in reproducing the
condition. I used to be able to selectively pick the collections I
wanted restored. Unless I'm missing something, now it seems to be all or
nothing. As I have in the past, I suppose I could create a second user
account on the Hub and use it to subscribe to a subset of my own
collections, but in comparison to the simpler path available previously,
this seems like a force-fit.

There's an interesting intersection with another relatively recent
change, that is, now when one deletes a published collection in Chandler
Desktop, Chandler also will delete this collection from the Hub. I guess
I also missed this thread on the list or something. And then I foolishly
didn't read the friendly warning dialog from Chandler that told me
exactly what it was going to do. All of my collections are intact on my
"master" instance of Chandler, thank goodness, but knowing this still
didn't prevent a small "amygdala hijack" when I first noticed the half-
dozen collections missing from my Hub account and realized my error. I
will have to go find the relevant thread. I don't understand the utility
to the user of automatically deleting published shares from the Hub
(even if the user is warned). Something like a [Yes][No] option for the
Hub delete operation would be quite a bit more useful.

I'm sending this note to the Design list, because that is where the
"restore published shares.." thread seems to have lived. If this would
be better discussed on the Users list, please feel free to repost, or
let me know if you would like me to do that.

Cheers, Andre
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