The Document Journal

1. Steven Garrity April 21, 2007

   It seems that the contents of this document journal, perhaps with limited access to the documents/files in question, could be mirrored on a private weblog for remote access as well.
2. Bryan Clark April 21, 2007

   Steven: Exactly! With the OLPC designs we had both a private web log mirror for all your files to be backed up on. As well as having a public local (avahi, http) journal that was a method for others to find and browse your files.
3. Luis Villa April 21, 2007

   Dammit, Bryan. If you start actually innovating you’ll make me regret going back to school. NO INNOVATION FOR YOU.
4. Andy Preston April 21, 2007

   I did some rough design for a program I was going to call “My Life” back in 98 and no-one has really come up with that really touches it yet, maybe http://www.stikkit.com comes close, but not really.

   Most things that we do, both in our lives and at work, don’t fit into the methods that we use to achieve them. Our lives are much more centered around big things such as a project, moving, organising the childs foorball games etc. Email, web etc are just conduits that make these bigger things happen. The way that the computer industry is trying to fix this is the “find” metaphor. I think this is backwards. My desk is a mess, but I know where things are. I don’t send out a search party each time I need something. I should be able to look under the “Move to Boston” (tab/icon/balloon etc ?) and see all the documents, emails etc related to that. I had somewhat imagined an interface with ballons, those at the top were more important and most recent, floating lower less important or less recent, much the way life occurs. An even is coming up, happens, then floats away into the past.

   To me this is not much use to me:
   * You created GNOME Document Journal icon (30 minutes total)
   * You edited your GNOME Document Journal blog entry (4 times, 1.3 hours total)
   * You responded to emails (12 replies, 38 minutes total)

   But this is:
   Gnome Project
   * You created GNOME Document Journal icon (30 minutes total)
   * You edited your GNOME Document Journal blog entry (4 times, 1.3 hours total)
   * You responded to emails (3 replies, 24 minutes total)
   Moving To Boston
   * You responded to emails (7 replies, 4 minutes total)
   Brians FootBall Game
   * You responded to emails (2 replies, 10 minutes total)

   I even think that maybe it could be done on the Beagle or other search type engine code base if it’s repacked to basically flip the metaphore around. If the apps are modified so that the email can easily be tagged/moved to a project, that it’s easy to be looking at the contents of the balloon for “Moving to Boston”, and you can easily from there say, “New Email” or “New Document” and you create the item automatically for that. I guess it almost needs to be built into the Window Manager to make it work fully integrated.

   I Hope I didn’t ramble too much and that it makes sense.

   Andy
5. Andrew Overholt April 21, 2007

   I’ve been thinking that it would be cool to take the task-focused UI bits of Mylar and spit out a “what I did this week” list. It tracks time, too. I realize it’s Eclipse-centric, but for those that use it, it’s cool

   http://eclipse.org/mylar

   Available in Fedora 7 with Bugzilla and Trac connectors.
6. Lee Willis April 22, 2007

   Erm, isn’t this exactly the same as MS Outlook’s identically named feature?

   [Open Outlook, "Go" Menu, "Journal"]

   [Not that it isn't a good idea - but Outlook has had this for year's AFAIK and no-one I know uses it ...]
7. Christopher Blizzard » Blog Archive » the journal for one laptop April 22, 2007

   [...] finally posted something about the Journal idea that he and Seth had been worked on way back when. We’re using a lot of these ideas for some [...]
8. Dean April 22, 2007

   Andy: That’s called ‘implicit querying’, your idea sounds similar-ish to dashboard in that it displays items related to the item you’re working on now, folks realised they needed a search engine to back dashboard and so beagle was born.
9. Andy Preston April 23, 2007

   Hi Dean,
   I’ve looked at Dashboard a couple of times, and wondered where it went ( reading Planet Gnome I found out ), but it still doesn’t full fill my need, at least where it was left off. It’s great it contains my last contacts with Joe, but it they were about project ABC and I’m now working on project XYZ, it doesn’t matter.

   I had originally thought what I had in mind was a seperate app, but I’ll describe this more as an extension to Nautilus with plug ins from different apps to make it all work, but it could be done either way

   1) Select “New Project”, enter name and optional fields such as members etc. The members would be from a global address list.
   2) Select “New Document”, select type, name etc and it’s added to project, edit and save.
   3) Select “Email Document”, email list occurs. This would be a list of people who are members and anyone with emails who have emailed into this project before. Write and send email. This is all done from this “Project Manager”, without entering the email client, say working through a plugin in brings up a compose window with auto attachment. This is currently implemented, apart from the intelligent email address.
   4) Have it auto check for emails, and add replies to the project. From the regular email client a user could also mark the email as being for this project and it would be visible in the project.

   I hope that makes it a little clearer. As a Gnome user, it seems like a lot of the pieces are there, needs integrating.

   I realise my thoughts go against the grain somewhat, in that the common thinking right now is to let all the different apps do what they want, and the current solution is for the app (Beagle, Tracker etc) try and bring all the data together in a sensible way.
   My thought is to give the user much more power initially by allowing them to only use one interface and to remove the current emphasis on the program that does the job, and bring it back onto the function. Once this is done, the Journal or Beagle type functionality becomes a lot more useful, since it has some basis to go from.

   Andy
10. Bryan Clark April 23, 2007

    Andy: Some good ideas. I would say the project creation stuff is a function of organizing and you’d use some kind of tag based system for that.

    The reason, AFAIK, for the current train of thought where you say you go against the grain is that nobody can get all those ducks in a row. It would be really nice for us to get everyone on board with the total vision and move to something like what you’re talking about. However the steps that’s easiest for us to take initially is to exemplify the cool interactions that are possible in one application and as certain pieces make sense to integrate into other apps people do so.
11. Bryan Clark April 23, 2007

    Andrew: Thanks for the link, I’d never seen that before. It would be cool to have a good hook into what’s going on in Eclipse development. I think the Journal could just be an interface to expose that work along with your other things.

    Lee: I’d never seen the Outlook Journal feature, hopefully I can take a peak at it sometime to understand what you mean. I wonder if it’s not useful because it doesn’t interface with anything except for email?
12. Dean April 23, 2007

    Bryan: I remember playing with the outlook journal a few years ago, things could have changed but I think it’s turned off by default. It does journal other outlook stuff too, calendar events and things, though that still leaves it far far away from interfacing with everything.
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