Re: Narrative for Finding and Reminding

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org>]

On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 03:50 -0400, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:

[Incoming email doesn't go into the reminders]
> OK. Is there some place unread email *can* go?

Your mail program's Inbox, as always.

I want the Reminders area to be a) completely under your control; b) not
a constant firehose.  It's not really a "collection area" in the
parlance of Getting Things Done.  In the same parlance, think of the
Reminders as an informal combination of a tickler file, @waiting-for,
and a calendar.

(I'm not yet sure how this intersects with Evolution's calendar.  Maybe
Evo should also show your reminders in its own calendar?  Maybe we
should store the reminders as VTODO items in evolution-data-server, with
the associated files as the VTODO's attachments?  Maybe we should have
another to-do provider for e-d-s that reads gnome-shell's reminders and
exposes them as VTODOs?)
 
> Will we have something, either in the existing calendar dropdown, or
> message tray, that has a visible reminder of urgent things?

Highlighting days with reminders, in the calendar dropdown, makes a lot
of sense.

I don't think it makes sense to have reminders presented in the message
tray.  Accessing the journal will be so frequent that you can always
glance at the Reminders area to see what's coming up.  Think of passive
reminders (the post-it you put on your front door), rather than an alarm
clock.

[Drag and drop]
> I want a separate, explicit UI that doesn't have drag and drop. When
> in the reminders view of the journal, maybe there's a toolbar with a
> "+" button that fades in up when you hover over the "Today". It
> doesn't have to be intrusive. Maybe it wouldn't be as featureful or
> intuitive (even though it should be for accessibility reasons), but it
> should be there. 

Certainly, we can have a "+" button.  Although that begs the question of
how you struggle to find files in the file chooser :)

I think that with suitably-placed, unobtrusive hints like "Drag files
here to create reminders", we can teach people how to exploit the
journal naturally.  A "+" button should be there for a11y, although it
would involve a bit more UI (maybe a dialog or something) to let you add
reminders for non-file things like URIs from a browser.

> And this is *exactly* what I meant by my last email by "deprecating
> the filesystem". I'd hate to see the filesystem as an implementation
> detail at one point. It should *always* be available, because it has a
> powerful taxonomical organization system built-in by way of its very
> nature, and I say with pride that I think the Windows 7 Libraries
> feature did a great job at utilizing the strengths of the raw
> filesystem, but making the gruntwork of "where did I put something" a
> bit less annoying while not trying to keep it around as "that thing
> that stores the files".

Please see my presentation starting at this slide:

http://people.gnome.org/~federico/docs/2008-GUADEC/html/img38.html

That slide, plus a few after that, is where I describe the whole
autosave-to-a-place-you-picked mechanism.  This makes the file system
the primary organization, and the journal just a convenient tool to
maintain your working set.

About Libraries in Windows 7 - maybe I need to test them in person, but
from the videos I saw, it looks like "just" a way to aggregate folders
into virtual ones.  That's nice, but it falls short of what Sebastian
Faubel showed us a couple GUADECs ago:

http://www.organise-fw.org/

(I can't find the mind-blowing demo right now... argh.)

[RDF triplets, metadata]
> OK, it tracks events, and "what", "when", "how" is part of some of the
> raw metadata that you have? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

I think you lack a little context.

There has been discussion of having an official way to store arbitrary
metadata for files and other things.  What the cool kids use to store
arbitrary metadata is RDF triplets, which are subject-verb-object.  For
example

	"Sorting-and-searching"   has-author   "Donald Knuth"

	trollcat.jpg		  has-exposure	"f/5.6 1/125 sec"

	Fearful-Symmetries.mp3    has-composer  "John Adams"

(In particular, Tracker has been suggested as an implementation of an
RDF store.)

Zeitgeist tracks very specific, *non-arbitrary* metadata for files and
other things.  It has its own database optimized for the kind of data it
stores (a sqlite database with a nice schema).  While we could
conceivably throw the data that Zeitgeist stores into a generic RDF
store, it would probably not be as efficient or direct.
 
> This was my idea to get rid of the the "getting lost" problem. You'd
> click on "Today", and you'd zoom in across the map to there. Click on
> "Tomorrow", and it pans to there.

This is very interesting.  Do you know of a good way to mock up behavior
like that?  Maybe some HTML canvas magic?  Paper prototypes are not, uh,
kinetic enough for that :)

> Hm... it sounds like I'm making reminders into those calendar events
> that EDS allows us... reminders are more loose than that, aren't they?

Yeah, kind of.  Reminders as I described them allow you to say, "this is
for some time next wee", but e-d-s wants a specific single-day date.  I
don't remember if VTODO items support both DTSTART and DTEND properties
("to-do item that is valid only in this time range") - maybe you can dig
up the iCalendar spec and check?

  Federico