Here's A List of Desired Features and Issues with Chandler

CPIA

• Support for Trees-of-Blocks that get cloned to display an item
• Support for a dependency system
  • provides a way for changes in one block to trigger resynchronization of other blocks
• Block discovery support
  • idea that blocks find other blocks they should be connected to, and the connections control inter-block notification
  • allows Detail View, summary views, in separate windows
  • allows discovery of the Sidebar(s)
  • currently the block containment hierarchy determines many notifications
• Toolbar buttons should follow the standard methodology for creation and synchronization
  • currently the items in tool bars are blocks, but don't have instantiate or synchronize methods
  • because the toolbar must be created first, and CPIA renders from bottom up
• Support for help strings on Toolbar buttons
• Support for changing the icon and label on toolbar buttons dynamically

Detail View

• Separate Synchronize Item in the Detail View
  • determines which blocks are shown/hidden
  • followed by synchronize widget
  • probably not needed in Trees-of-Blocks world
• Support for Trees-of-Blocks
• Support for 3rd-party registration of Trees-of-Blocks

Repository

Strong need

• Dependency/Notification mechanism, e.g. monitors
  • Provides a way to notify items that monitored items have changed

• Support for computed attributes
  • could be a computed attribute redirection (computation determines which attribute is targetted)
  • could be completly code-based -- like Python properties
  • if code-based, maybe no repository support is needed

• Coherent convert-to-string conventions
  • items should all know how to convert themselves to a user-readable string
  • ref collections should produce a nice comma-separated sequence
  • aliased ref collections should produce something like you get when printing a dictionary

Weakly desired

• Ability to have a reference to an attribute
  • Use case: a Detail View block's "contents" would be a reference to an item's attribute

Content Model

• Unified "who" fields for content items
• Use of computed redirects or computed attributes for "date" etc
• Simplified stamping model (no extra bag of attributes for Task/Event)

-- DonnDenman - 16 Oct 2004