http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?
msg_id=00008c&topic_id=1&topic=
on work organization / paper
We need to think about what can we do to improve that in étoilé :-)
I think the key to all this is that when people organize information,
they don't do it my name or datatype. They organize by project. Why
isn't the "Project" a first-class desktop component, much like folders
and files are?
Like Martin Ternouth says in his entry in the above URL (his has the
fancy diagrams), he looks at one "Task" at a time -- one Project. He
doesn't work in one Application at a time, or look only at his printed
out email correspondences -- he looks holistically at everything in a
Task/Project, figures out the relationships between objects, and zooms
in on the one he wants.
Here's how I see it could work and be expanded on as a desktop system:
The primary organizational building block is the Project. When you
start a new Project you create a Project space. That space is a
basically a virtual desktop. When you view a Project, you get an
Expose-like view (small representations of the files, but not icons,
just shrunk down versions of the actual documents) of everything in
that Project at once -- I'm going to call this view Overview. Overview
is special in that it can be spatially organized, and annotated like
here:
http://dromasoftware.com/etoile/mediawiki/index.php?
title=Annotations_in_Workspace . Unlike Expose, when documents are
added or removed, the annotations and locations of objects retain their
positions. All of this is stored as metadata within the Project folder.
If I want to work on a file or view it more closely, I click on it,
just like Expose, and it zooms in and launches the components/palettes
I need for working on that type of file. Files can't be worked out
outside the context of a Project -- just like you can't open a
Photoshop document without having a desktop/window manager. Therefore a
document is always associated with a Project, and can be moved to a new
or different Project if the current one isn't appropriate.
When you start a different Project, the old one is hidden and the new
one is triggered -- new desktop, new Overview, new documents.
Ideas? How can we build on this? Do we want to?
J.
