[Q][Celeste] address book and auto-save

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sun Mar 17 20:54:55 UTC 2002


rwithers12 at attbi.com wrote:
> "Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> > rwithers12 at attbi.com wrote:
> > > Um, we somehow seem to be missing each other on this idiom discussion. 
> > > Have you ever used Outlook or Eudora? :)   You know how they have some
> > > extra columns and highlighting, which basically allows one to annotate
> > > the emails with 'flagged' or 'unread'?  This is the idiom I am thinking
> > > of - not the category idiom.  I see your point that you can use filters
> > > and categories to do the same kind of thing, especially since you can
> > > put the same msg in multiple categories.  It is just taking getting use
> > > to.
> > > 
> > 
> > For read and unread, I'm 100% sure that categories will do very nicely. 
> > I don't know if they'd be better or worse, but they'd be very good.
> > 
> > For marked/unmarked, I'm not so sure.  At any rate, there should be UI
> > support for at least one mark.  E.g., if anything is marked, then "move
> > all" should probably be replaced by "move marked".  And the mark should
> > appear in the display.  Still, it's not *as* big of a deal if you have
> > filters.  You can, e.g., select all messages with some keyword in the
> > subject, very easily, and so there are fewer times that you'd manually
> > mark a bunch of messages.
> 
> Lex,
> 
> Let me mention again that I am looking at that last 5% of functionality.
>  Let's call it the LazyMan's Celeste.  :)   I just ran into a situation
> where I had read some of the stuff in my inbox, and had responded to a
> few of the messages, but I couldn't remember if I had responded to one
> in particular, so I was wishing that a) I had moved the message after
> responding to it and b) I had a little flag that told me it had been
> responded to, so there's another annotation.  I'll bet we could create
> an annotations file, that is indexed the same and as an extension to the
> MailDB.
> 

Categories *are* annotations.  Does that clear up where I'm coming from?
 A lot of the things you are saying we should extend Celeste for, are
handled automatically by the categories mechanism.  It won't be exactly
the same UI, but the functionality and the overall number of
interactions will be about the same.


The main things missing to get from here to there are:

	1. Celeste should automatically manage a few categories, e.g. 'read'.

	2. Celeste should probably have a *negative* category filter available,
e.g. "show me messages *not* in category 'read'".



-Lex



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