PIMLite User Interface Round 3

24th December 1993 (Merry Christmas!)

Status of the PIMLite project

My apologies for the delays from what I thought would be a fast Human Interface beta process. I guess this proves the worth of this kind of testing - the highly varied results I received mean that I have had to re-evaluate some fundamentals of my design.

I've also been involved in a couple of related projects which have allowed me to test some of the ideas being used in PIMLite. The Tagging process seems to work well for simple uses, but more thinking is required for grouping tags.

I will be sending a fourth HI beta shortly after Christmas, including new screen shots. To all the new beta testers, welcome on board! At the end of this letter you will see HI beta 2 (a text document) followed by a Binhexed archive of HI beta 1. The Binhexed archive is a Stuffit Deluxe archive of a self-playing document, containing screen shots.

DECISIONS SINCE HI BETA 2 Some means of grouping tags in a hierarchy will be used - alternatives are coming in the next HI beta but you will definitely be able to have a tag belong to several groups.

Sophisticated searches will be implemented, although not in the early betas.

RTF and XTND export will be implemented eventually, but not necessarily in the first release.

WHICH QUESTIONS TO IGNORE 1, 2,
"Write Ideas" has been picked

14 - found one "Mercutio" allows me to use and display command-shift keys

16 - I WILL be putting separator lines in the Windows menu

CLARIFICATION The note and tag windows will change significantly. On the Notes window, the thick black line between the editing area and the list of tags is draggable so you can have a large editing area or a lot of tags with a small editing area (like the pane splitters in Word).

NEW QUESTIONS
Q20 Given a splitter across the Notes window, should the scrollbar go to the top of the window but scroll only the note area, or should the scrollbar be terminated as shown in the picture just after question 9?

Q21
I will be changing the nature of Tags so they can contain values - Value Tags will be applied to a number of notes (eg: Date Modified) but contain a different value for each note. What types of values would you like to attach to notes - I have plans for Date/Times, Integers and Real numbers? (This would let you attach Expense tags to diaries etc. and add up the totals for a range of notes).

Q23
Does anyone see the need to be able to search tags and/or titles by the trailing characters (eg: ending in "programmer")?

Links

Round 2

Round 4

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