Hi Davor,
I think there are really 2 issues at hand:
1. Why not have overlays behave the same way as in iCal?
2. Why have a special widget for overlays?
To answer question # 1:
+ Chandler doesn't automatically overlay the collection you select.
Instead, you need to explicitly click the overlay button to do that.
This allows you to do something I've been calling a 'drive-by'
overlay where you temporarily overlay say a spouse or co-workers
calendar to schedule a meeting.
+ Chandler overlay widgetry was designed to scale to cover overlays
in the other app areas as well. Automatically overlaying a selected
collection when you're in Table View would be pretty annoying. It's
harder to ignore the items in the 'overlayed, but not selected'
collections in a table, so every time you clicked in the sidebar to
change your view, you'd end up overlaying 2 collections instead.
To answer question #2:
Originally collections were going to be typed by what attribute they
were defined around.
+ A collection defined around 'From=Tom' would be a 'Who' type
collection with a corresponding icon for visual feedback.
+ A collection defined around 'Date Range=Last Week' would be a
'Time' type collection with a corresponding icon. etc etc.
I wanted a way to display the icon without adding 4th column to the
sidebar.
Since we don't have immediate plans to implement overlays in the
table or smart collections, it might be worth the work to replace
what we have with checkboxes and simply disappear the checkboxes in
the All/Mail/Tasks App areas. However, we would want to figure out a
way to 'color' the checkboxes and/or color code the sharing status
icons.
Mimi
On Dec 12, 2007, at 9:37 PM, Davor Cubranic wrote:
On Wednesday 12 December 2007 02:00:29 Mimi Yin wrote:
My understanding of the question was: Why use a complicated new
widget to do what everybody else uses a simple checkbox for? My reply
was that the functionality in Chandler isn't the same as the
functionality everybody else uses a simple checkbox for. So it's
possible our problem has more to do with providing better visual
feedback to more effectively communicate what's different about
Chandler overlays.
I started up iCal the other day to see what it's like and noticed that
its calendar sidebar appears to be very similar to Chandler's sidebar:
multiple calendars (collections) can be overlaid on the screen, but
only one is "selected" and new events go into it by default. I haven't
used iCal enough to completely test this, but are there any
significant
differences from Chandler's sidebar? I'm asking because iCal uses
checkboxes for choosing overlays and a highlight for the active
selection.
Davor
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