Re: Query Branch: UI Proposal

["Ben Monnahan" <monnahan gmail com>]

Clarifications follow.

2006/8/16, Stephane Delcroix <stephane delcroix org>:

- what about selecting a category ? items will be still OR'ed, whatever
the scheme, or... ? I mean, choosing Pets AND Favorites needs to be
(internally) translated to (Dogs OR Cats) AND Favorites

My mental scheme of how the heirarchical tags work (not sure how it works internally, and as far as the UI goes it shouldn' t really matter.  We don't want our UI to be dependent on internal implementation if we can avoid it) is that any picture tagged with Dog or Cat implicitly has the Pet tag.  Sort of like extending a base class.  FileInputStream is_a InputStream -> TRUE.

- what about the NOT operator ? After trying to find a real use case to
describe the needs, I don't think we need it in the general UI. idem for
the XOR (but both could be very useful in the advanced UI. don't forget
about it)

I hadn't considered NOT, but thats a good point.  I'd be tempted to leave it in the advanced UI unless someone can come up with a super simple way to integrate it.

- about the tray. If I understand well, that's a way of storing query
and OR'ing them ? Do you have any sketch (even scanned from paper) of
this ?

Like I said, I lifted the idea from someone else, who I believe saw it in Picasa.  The idea would be part of the F-Spot window would be a separate photo list of a working set of photos.  The set of photos you want to export, make black and white, email to your mom, etc.  Combining this with the basic queries you could build more complex queries by adding the results of the basic queries together in the tray.

The basic workflow for ((Dog OR Cat) AND Favorite) would be:
Select "Require All"
Check Favorite
Check Dog
Select All
Drag to tray (or right-click and choose "Add to tray")
Uncheck Dog
Check Cat
Select All
Drag to tray

This may seem like a lot of work, but they are all simple steps that for the most part keep the same UI as we currently have.  If you had "Pets" and didn't have any other subtags,  you could just to (Pets AND Favorite).  With NOT you could even allow for (Pets AND NOT Goldfish AND Favorite) but again this for me breaks the spirit of the current UI.  If we could come up with a simple way to represent NOT I'd be open to it but otherwise I thinks its best left for the advanced UI, which hopefully will be highly usable as well.


Here is how I'm imagining the tray looking, although its really up in the air.  If someone has a  more clear idea on how it would look please come forward.  The tray would be one-click hideable/showable and also you can drag to make it bigger or smaller.

--------------------------------
| T |                                 |
| a |  Main Photo List     |
| g |                                 |
| s |                                 |
|___|__________________|
|             Tray                  |
|______________________|

Ben