Next actions

• Mimi and Sheila to work out Sections in the Summary Table spec

High-level goals for 0.7: Why we care about providing a more powerful content model in 0.7

Build a generic framework so that productivity geeks (need to develop persona further) can try different ways of setting up task management on their own, save them as skins and offer them up as packaged user experiences to other users. This is useful as a way to drive the open-source collaborative design process and allows us to test several different designs in the real world.

Content model proposal

Hierarchy of labels:

• Tags: all-purpose, generic attributes, similar to keywords.
• Attribute types. Who, What, When, Where, Status, Value
• Attributes. For example, the Who: Attribute type might contain the following attributes: From, To, CC, BCC, Creator, Author

• Attribute values can hang off both Attribute types (ie. Who: James) and specific Attributes (From: James)
  • Open issue Thinking about this more, I can see compelling use cases for not allowing users to define attribute values for the top-level attribute types. For example, it would be nice to be able to search on Who: James so that you get all items that have Who-type attribute value of James, regardless of whether it's From: James, To: James, Creator: James or Undertaker: James et cetera.
  • There's nothing stopping someone from specifying an attribute called Who: that belongs within the Who family. But I think it would be nice if we could keep the top level attribute types themselves, free of specific attribute values.
• Tags: is an Attribute in the What Attribute type.

We need to be able to port attribute values from one attribute to another without losing meta-data about that attribute value.

• ie. What are all the items that have this attribute value?
• Is the attribute value an item itself (ie. a contact or a location)
• Where in the UI does this attribute value exist as a collection or a section?

User-defined attributes in the Detail view

• Workflow
• Select from Item menu>>Add attribute>>Who, What, When, Where, Status, Value...
• Plops a new attribute field in the detail view (specific location in the UI TBD)

OR

• Right-click in the detail view chrome to "Add a new attribute"

OR

• Righ-click on attribute value in detail view to "Change attribute"

OR

• Right-click on an attribute in detail view to "Remove attribute"

• OI Does "Add/Remove attribute" add/remove the attribute to the item or the Kind?

• Attribute types can have their own Attribute values (ie. Who: Jeremy) which are distinct from values for sub-attributes: From: Jenny

Nice to haves

• User can view attributes in detail view grouped by Kind (what it is today) or by Attribute type (Who, What, When, Where, Status, Value)

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Content model and the Summary table

• If we stick with the idea that all objects in Chandler have semantics:
  • ie. Collections
  • then Sections too, should have user-definable semantics

• Sections are attached to a column in the table.
• Sections are attached to an Attribute: Attribute value pair that is also reflected in the detail view of the items in the Section
• Sections can be attached to the Attribute type defined by the column or any sub-attribute within that attribute type (ie. Who: Jeremy or From: Jeremy)

• Open Issues
• How do we section the When column? Ideally, around human-centric chunks of time.
  • Today
  • Yesterday
  • This week
  • Last week
  • Last month
  • Older
  • Do these Attributes automatically appear on the detail view of member items?
  • Do these Attributes only appear when users turn on sections and section by Date?
  • Or do we introduce the notion of "Ghost" attributes that don't appear on items?
• How many levels of sections to we have? 2? n?

• Sections themselves are items with their own attributes (This is how we might model clusters of tasks to make Projects).
• Form example a Project: Foo section would have it's own Triage status and could even be stamped and put on the calendar or emailed. Ideally it would be nice if you could "share" a whole section of items like that, but as a first step, treating the Project: Foo Section/Item as a single item would be good enough.

• Workflows for activating sections
• Select "View menu>>Section view" to either:
• Allow the user to select which attribute to base the sections on or
• Pick one attribute (ie. the Triage attribute or the generic Tag attribute)

OR

• Click on column to section by attribute defined by that column (ie. By Who)

AND/OR

• Select "View menu>>Section by..." to select some other attribute not shown in the columns

• OI: Do we have sub-sections?

Personas to develop for task management and content modeling issues:

• Esther Dyson: High-level executive
• Merlin: Productivity geek
• Mini: Normal person who is an information worker

Attribute manager mockup

• Attribute_manager.png:
  

• DotSeven^?_Triage_Sections.png:
  

• DotSeven^?_Sections.png: