Dashboard Phase 1

Mimi, Alec, John, Philippe (note taker)

Tuesday, March 7th 2006

Spec: Dashboard 0.7

Context (Mimi)

What we are shooting for in Dashboard for 0.7alpha2:

• Standard things that a table should do like in an email client
• Not too much effort on In Place editing in that phase
• Sort important to get the dashboard triaging to work
• Search important : we will search the entire repository, example of user scenario :
  • User is in a user defined collection called "Home" using the calendar view and types "meeting" in the search field
  • View switch to STB and shows the "Home" elements that match the search
  • Ideally : we have a badge with a number next to each collection in the side bar giving the number of matches for each
  • We won't see the result in the calendar (at least in Phase 1)
  • Ideally : we would have a split table/calendar view (not Phase 1 or even 0.7)
  • Ideally : we need to solve the selection persistence when switching views (John)

To Do and Issues

• Prio 1 : wxColumnHeader integration
• Sort is here but it's not "stable" (we don't have Primary/Secondary/etc... when chaining sorts). The issue is that Chandler remembers the sorts independently per column so we can't support the 'stable' feature. Ideas :
  • Do stable sort unless the list is really large (John)
  • Sort only Primary/Secondary (Alec)
  • Do Primary and always use "date" for secondary sort (Mimi)
• Plan of record : We'll go with Mimi's proposal for sort right now.
• Issue with date sorting : the old or new stuff show up first and they are not the most relevant. We should scroll to the "today" section so to mitigate that issue (John). We could also add anchor in the scrollbar (not 0.7). We'll go with John's suggestion right now.
• Do we want bold face for new stuff? (Alec) Not in phase 1 but we should have that eventually (that's a standard email feature). Triage status is somewhat superseeding this though.
• Triage column in there, not required in Phase 1 but OK to leave it there.
• Search is quite a big chunk :
  • Index are here but we never really worked with that
  • We may need a more extensive Search spec that really takes advantage of PyLucene
  • Andi to brief Mimi and others on this
  • May be we should have a design session on this
• Redirection issue : John did some work on that. Need to bring it to the dev list.
• Multi select and Detail View : What do we see in the DV? Ideally, show the common attributes (like iTunes). We'll certainly just display "blank" for 0.7
• Multi select of collections: the selected collections should both be saturated (we'll have a set of primary collections instead of just one)
• Keyboard navigation : there's something checked by David that broke it recently. John to go fix it.
• Grid lines: let's try to suppress them and use larger font to make rows more clear. Alternating rows are good too but we'll try only without it first. Background colors could be used later for other things like threads for instance.