PIMLite User Interface Beta Round 2

PIMLite User Interface Beta Round 2

PIMLite Human Interface Beta 2

2nd September 1993

Thanks to the 30% of you who have responded to the first HI beta.

Hopefully this 2nd HI beta will clarify some confusion (yours and mine) over the classification of tags. If this issue seems to be dragging on, it is because I want to get the database structures correct from day one, to avoid having to convert existing data and for PIMLite to be efficient for people doing cross-indexing with thousands of tags and megabytes of notes.

BTW, the name I have tentatively selected is Write Ideas. (Thanks mainly to Ken Taylor).

Now to my current state of confusion.

I have problems over the organisation and presentation of tags in some form of inter-related or grouped manner:

Tags are organized into categories (or groups) which may belong to a hierarchy of categories. eg: the tag Bill Smith may belong directly to 2 categories: "USA Friends" and "TCL Programmers". We end up with a hierarchy something like:

Friends

USA Friends

Bill Smith

Programmers

Object-Oriented Programmers

TCL Programmers

Bill Smith

I then need some compact way of browsing this hierarchy, and easily assigning tags to multiple categories (due to your requests).

The issues in categorising tags are: 1a When a tag is created, it has to go into a category - this implies "current category" is indicated somewhere obvious

1b There should be a way of creating categories at any level of the hierarchy. In HI beta 1 I showed a rough screen which allowed you to mark any tag as being a "parent" -> creating a new category at that level.

1c The hierarchy of categories should be browsable. HI Beta 1 showed a list of categories, with a popup menu above them, to mimic the Standard Open method of looking at hierarchies of directories.

Most people seemed to think this would be alright, if rearranged so the categories were on the left and tags on the right, and more explicit labels included.

Q9a Given that the list of categories, with popup menu above, behaves very much like the Standard Open dialog, should it:
- display only categories within the current category (same as SF)
OR
- always display all categories, with the popup menu only used to see the list of parents (back up the family tree, for the highlighed cat).

Q17 Given that tags can belong to multiple categories, does it also make sense that a category can belong to multiple parents?

(This is where it starts getting hard to represent on the screen! If categories with multiple parents AREN'T allowed, then maybe I should have a different process of creating categories. Otherwise, I would have to cope with taking a tag that exists in multiple categories and making it into a category itself, that can only exist in one category!)

CROSS-INDEXING I haven't raised the cross-indexing issue before - it doesn't have as much impact on the database structure as deciding the tag organization - I could leave this out of the first beta release of the software.

However, a couple of thoughts just struck me that you may wish to mull over:

Q18 Would you like to display tags by their frequency, eg: most frequently encountered word (phrases) down to least frequent.

Q19 Would you like to be able to sort the notes in the list by the number of tags applied to them, eg: so you can see the most heavily cross-referenced items first.