Hi Mimi, I like your ideas for light-weight "clusters" by highlighting related items (like in Apple Mail) very much. One additional UI improvement would be to have a "quick navigation" key shortcut to jump to the next/previous linked item.
But your proposal for clustering also means that there is only one axis of grouping, i.e., that an item can exist only in a single cluster at a given time. Which, in my mind, is a step backward from the flexibility afforded by collections, although I don't have a better solution myself. This brings me to my other point: I also fear that if you try to present "collections" as "workspaces" and advocate project workflows as below, one of the neatest features of collections will get overlooked: that an item can exist in multiple collections at the same time. Perhaps one way to handle the problem of not having enough space in the sidebar for all the collections is by having a way to not always show all collections within it. For example, what if the collections were hierarchical? This way once could have 5-6 top level collections, which is about the limit that I find fits comfortably, and open or collapse those nodes as needed. Alternatively, maybe we can have "app areas" hold different subsets of collections. These areas wouldn't be divided by the item type as they are today, but be used more like "workspaces", so I could have, say, the "Contexts" workspace and the "Home projects" workspace, etc. Davor _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
