[IAEP] 2 design proposals: home view, discoverable shortcuts

Jameson Quinn jameson.quinn at gmail.com
Sun Mar 22 21:42:34 EDT 2009


>
> I view "resume by default" as a kind of ugly hack ...


In fact, "resume by default" has the really awful result that in 0.84
> users will naturally tend to overwrite important documents...


In the current world, this is ugly. However, with a versioned datastore -
something I think it's not unreasonable to hope for as soon as 0.86 - this
would be much less of a problem. Add some smarts in activities to treat
"resume, immediately erase over 90% of content" as "create new instance" and
you have no more problem here at all.

On the other hand, I would still advocate for "resume by default" in a world
of infinite disk space and versioned file system. I suspect it is most
frequently the desired behavior. Yes, I realize that this makes the home
view just an alternate interface to the journal.


>
>
> (Resume by default also includes "alt+tab by default", ...


My proposal includes visual cues to differentiate "alt+tab by default"
activities from "resume by default" ones, and the ability to halt the
"alt-tab" ones from the home view. Also consider that the "recent" filter
would logically pick up all currently-running activities. That would begin
to address this issue.

(If we do not support this proposal, this might be a reasonable use for
concentric circles in the home view - inner circle would be like ~656 sugar,
outer one would be like current sugar.)


>
>
> NONETHELESS, I think you make a very important point: the Journal should
> really replace the Home View.  Logically, the Journal makes perfect sense
> at that point in the zoom hierarchy.  It would also resolve the weirdness
> of the Journal being a single-instance pseudo-activity.  The trick, then,
> will be to come up with a Journal interface that is suitable for use as
> the main launching point.  From that perspective, your mockups explore
> some very important ideas.


I agree, provided of course that there is a clear and easy way to create new
instances from this new journal. However, I still like the ring view/list
view choice - a non-text-centric interface is a worthwhile goal IMO. My
proposal can just as easily be thought of as an alternate "ring view" for
the journal, as as an enhanced home view layout proposal. The only missing
piece for a newer-better combined-journal-and-home-view is a good way (or,
probably, a few good ways) to create new instances from inside journal list
view.
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