Hello everyone, I'm Karl, and this is my introduction :) For some time I've been musing over the user interface in conduit, and as John has already blogged about was my first attempt at making the conduit UI rock. Since then I've been thinking in great detail about the way that information is presented to the user. In an attempt to clean things up and make an interesting jump into a dare I say it "new sync paradigm" what I've thought is the following; * If there is only one type of data type per relationship then the most important UI feature is that data type. Therefore a tab type philosophy should probably be adopted to represent the data types the user cares about, i.e. notes, calendars, contacts, files etc... * If there is essentially one authority in a relationship then that authority should be shown at the root of the relationship. Currently conduit does this by showing the authority on the left. * Further to the authority, elements in the relationship can be either a replicant or a publishing destination depending on whether or not they can provide two way sync. After making these grand assumptions about the use case of conduit I have put together a display of what one of these relationships would look like. It becomes obvious that a vertical approach provides a cleaner and more spacious display. (see attached screenshot), within each of the tabs (and I'm not convinced about tabs but I'm yet to design the glade mockup), management of data providers and a list of the relationships that exist are a necessity but these should be displayed relevant to the task at hand, if I'm managing my notes relationships I don't want to see data providers that don't allow me to sync notes. I'm eagerly awaiting comments on this, as I've been drawing sketches on paper over the last few months wracking my brains on how I can make conduit UI zen happen. Regards, K,
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