Hi Keith,
Thank you for your detailed write-up...see below for more in-line...
On Oct 19, 2007, at 6:03 PM, Keith Winsor wrote:
Normal routine involves a lot of calendar use, shuffling
appointments, taking bookings, dealing with sales reps in the day
job. This is where month view or, better, multi-week view would be
a boon - dragging an appointment from one week to the next, instead
of having to highlight and alter dates (pop-up calendar would be
nice). I know both of these have been discussed, so I won't labour
the point, save to say that it's things like entering dates,
something that I do many tens of times a day, that at the moment
can make Chandler feel clunky. The same applies to the 'Go to date'
feature, useful but fiddly at present, both of these perhaps in
part due to my using tablet and UMPC in slate mode - an interface
that allowed a few simple taps and no typing would be a big
improvement.
As in a mini-calendar drop-down from the date/time fields?
On the other hand, triage is so simple and effective that it's
already made Chandler my organisational tool of choice. Any spare
five minutes will see me in triage table view, reviewing Now then,
time permitting, Later. Again, the already discussed issue of
sorting of Later is a barrier at the moment. I think Mimi's
proposal to sort Later by 'date of impending triage to Now' pretty
much nails it. I'm inclined to agree with the 'Now' proposal as
well: sort in due date/time order but float changed items to the
top for immediate attention.
I'm still not sure about this one, but I will write a more detailed
response to the list in response to the 'Triage Sort in the NOW
sections' thread. http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/
2007-November/007836.html
I'm not a great fan of the 'auto-triage to Done' idea - I'd always
worry that something I hadn't notice would be marked Done without
my noticing it. However, disabling it for items stamped as tasks is
a step in the right direction. Maybe disabling for zero-duration
events could be included - I have a good few of those, in lieu of
recurring tasks.
Yup. I think this is going to be our proposal of record for Auto-
triage to DONE.
A few general comments:
Some of the 'clickables' need to be made to look more like they can
be clicked - I only discovered a couple of hours ago that clicking
on a day name in calendar view switches to that day in day view.
Yup. This is something we're hoping to address as we integrate the
Month/Multi-Week view with the Week/Day views and we gain more
control over how we draw our widgets.
Many of the icons used, especially the status icons (needs reply,
draft in, etc) I don't find sufficiently intuitive. I find I have
to keep a lookup close to hand to work out what a 'clockwise arrow
on top of two blocks' actually means.
Yes. We're continually tweaking these status icons. Part of the
problem is that 'draft status' (the blocks your describing above)
shows up *whenever* you 'Address an item' or edit a sent/received
email...whether or not you intend to send that item as an email or
send you edits in an update email. I sent a proposal to the
I think your next paragraph is exactly the kind of scenario that
results in confusion over the 2-blocks 'draft-status' icons.
I haven't used any of the email sending functions with regard to
updating appointments. If I get a B&B enquiry from a customer, I
drag it into a Chandler folder to generate an event (<<Name>>
double, 2 nights) and wait for my wife to sync in order for her to
become aware of the appointment. Initially, I wasn't sure what
would be sent to whom and so we worked around it by just waiting
for autosync to occur. I promise I'll play with this more :-)
I think a 'conflict resolution' screen should pop up whenever a
sync is carried out. Because my wife only uses Chandler as a
calendar, she doesn't get to see the warning icon in triage views,
which then stops her calendar being updated, making us fall out of
sync. A screen listing all sync conflicts and permitting 'Accept
all', 'Deny all' and the other single-item-at-a-time options would
be a big improvement.
Yes that sounds like a serious problem. A good interim solution might
be to put up an conflict icon in the sidebar, next to the
collection...prompting her to go take a look at it in the All-
Application Area.
I've logged a bug to track the issue: https://
bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11317
Even if it doesn't pop up, some form of warning icon, visible in
every view, would be an improvement, bringing up the conflicts to
resolve list. Also some of the conflict message themselves could be
a little less cryptic: Rrule, followed by an apparently random
string of digits and letters, could puzzle a more naive user.
Yes! Thanks for piping up about this. We're working on building a
translation layer between the 'data model' and the end-user content
model so that we have more control over what we display.
I hope this, my first full-length novel, has been useful. Let me
know if I can flesh out more detail. But it's 2am here and I'm off
to bed!
Good night all.
Keith
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