Hi Davor,
In my mind, items can still belong to multiple clusters. You can
select items 1,3,5,7 and make that a cluster. And then you can select
3,6,9,12 and make that a cluster and 3 belongs in both clusters.
When you select 3, a nice to have would be to have the 2 clusters
show up highlighted in different colors.
As for projects in the sidebar, what feels wrong to be about that is
that projects are ephemeral, they come and go. Whereas, generally
speaking, sidebar items stick around for a long time. Projects also
need 'focus' management, aka triage. My feeling is that it would be
hard to manipulate what projects you wanted to focus on within the
confines of a hierarchy. You might be 'making progress' on a dozen
projects at any given time, which dozen depends on timing, outside
circumstances. Mixed in there might be meetings you need to attend
and ideas you need to follow up on.
I don't disagree that some 'Chandler-esque' form of hierarchy in the
sidebar would be useful. For example I have 12 persistent areas of
responsibility (collections) in the sidebar that would be much better
organized if I could group them into 3 'spheres'. But I think that's
a separate thing from projects.
Mimi
On Dec 1, 2007, at 10:03 PM, Davor Cubranic wrote:
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
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