Design Group Meeting, 4 Mar 2004

Attending: MimiYin, MitchKapor, ChaoLam, BrianDouglasSkinner, KatieCappsParlante, MorgenSagen, JedBurgess, StuartParmenter, JohnAnderson

Goals:

• Mimi to give apps group a walkthrough of the current UI plans
• The goal of the meeting was not to make decisions, but merely to jump-start the dialogue between Design and Apps.

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Pages we walked through

• Abbreviations that are used regularly in our design documents:
  • Design Abbreviations

• Workflow specs:
  • Stamping
  • Explicit Collections
  • Organizing Items In View
  • Building Layouts

• UI Component Specs:
  • Sidebar
  • Summary Table View
  • Detail View

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Open Issues

• in the context of Building Layouts
  • Using wxWidgets, can we support lots of rich drag and drop affordances?
    • e.g. changing the icon of the dragged item when it hovers over one drop target vs. another
    • e.g. alpha channel in the dragged icon
    • e.g. drag and drop to/from non-Chandler apps
  • What aspects of a view persist between invocations?
    • scroll bar positions?
    • current selection?
    • column widths?
    • etc.
  • If the sidebar is not currently showing (it's been hidden, or minimized), can you still navigate to everything that you could have navigated to using the sidebar?
  • How important is it to us to be able to have different panes that show different tabs, as in the 02view_layouts.gif sketch in BuildingLayoutsWorkflow?
  • If the user clicks from one tab to another, which parts of the chrome (nav bar, side bar, menus, etc.) change based on which tab/view is currently selected?

• in the context of Stamping
  • How should we model stamped items?
    • If you stamp a mail message as a task, the current content model is designed to represent that as two items related by an item reference.
    • If you treat a task as a calendar event, the current content model is designed to represent that as one item which is an instance of a kind that has available all the attributes of both a task and a calendar event.
    • John suggests that in the python code, the best way to handle these stamped items would be to represent them using python multiple inheritance.
    • We need to review the content model and the python mapping, identify what different need to be taken into account, and pick a design.

• in the context of Sidebar
  • In the wireframes, the letters M, C, N, and Ct are just placeholders. We need to decide what we want to replace them with.

• in the context of Explicit Collections
  • We have some terminology issues to work out for different sorts of collections. We have a variety of different names that mean different things to different people. We need to deprecate some of these terms, and rename some, and end up with just a few terms that are well defined and mean the same thing to everyone. Here are the inadequate terms we've been using:
    • attribute-based collection
    • explicit collection
    • collection
    • item collection
    • playlist
    • smart playlist
  • What's the content model for the different types of collections?
  • When you drag and drop item A from one view into another, how do you tell whether the drop target is the view itself vs. some specific item in the view? If you drop item A onto item B, that puts A into B's default collection, if B has one. If not, a new collection is created and becomes B's default collection. In what cases does a new collection get created for A? What collection does B get put into? What default names are set for these collections?

• in the context of Summary Table View and Detail View
  • We have some terminology issues about the word view. If you click on a tab that shows a "page" where there is a summary table above and a detail area below, are you seeing one view (the "page"), or two views (the summary view and the detail view), or three views (the "page" view, with nested views for the summary view and the detail view? Is there such a thing as a "view type" (like month view or week view or a table view)?
  • What's are the relationships between views and queries and blocks? If I change what columns are visible in my Inbox, what other "views" are affected? Are "Sent" and "Outbox" really two views, or just one view that is sometimes populated by one query and sometimes populated by another?
  • How does the user find out what features are available in the UI? Is there a way to see all the "hot spots" available in a window? If a row of text has some glyph next to it, or has the number "(10)" next to it, is there a way to find out what that means? Is there a way to see what parts of the UI would have balloon help available if you were to hover over them?

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Assertions

• A Capplet encapsulates the user facing aspects of a parcel (if a parcel has a user face). The capplet can control the chrome -- for example, the capplet can set which menu items are available.

• You can put an item in a collection, but you can't put a collection in a collection.

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Next Actions

• On the view/query question...
  • What's are the relationships between views and queries and blocks? If I change what columns are visible in my Inbox, what other "views" are affected? Are "Sent" and "Outbox" really two views, or just one view that is sometimes populated by one query and sometimes populated by another?
  • John to write up a brief summary of the issue.
  • Mitch to work with John and the apps group to come to a resolution.

• On the issue of how to plan what UI components and blocks to have in 0.4, and what to work on in what order...
  • Katie to own the task of driving the process
  • Apps group to make plan
  • Apps group to collaborate with design group -- apps group may want to pull Mimi and/or BrianDouglasSkinner into the process

• On the issue of modeling collections...
  • Management committee to take ownership of this issue. Management committee will talk about this in their next meeting and think about what the best next step is.

• Design group to read through CPIA and the 0.3 Chandler release

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• BrianDouglasSkinner - 04 Mar 2004