Re: Status report... (near term roadmap)

Gunnar,

> define the title for each album manually. Maybe

This sounds pretty easy. I'll definitely do this.

Do I think that Pixory needs top-level presentations
other than 'flat' chronological order? 

The short answer: most definitely-- they are planned.

The long answer:

In general, I don't like to talk a lot about the
'roadmap' for Pixory development, because that could
raise expectations for when major new features will be
released and create frustrations for users if their
features aren't coming fast enough. However, I don't
want Pixory users to think that I view the current
version (beta 2.12) as anything close to a good,
flexible, powerful picture management and sharing
system-- I don't. But because of the current Pixory
development team size (1), I have chosen to develope
Pixory in an iterative, incremental fashion, where the
increments can be quite small. Practically speaking,
this means that to get Pixory from point A to point D
may involve passing through intermediate points B and
C which may not be obviously related to the end-point.

For the very near term, I'm working on a more powerful
'sharing model'. The 'sharing model' defines who gets
to see what. Right now, Pixory is quite
unsophisticated. It's basically a two tier sharing
model: you can share a specific album by sending an
email invite, or you can mark albums public and then
everyone can see them. I'm working towards allowing
the composer to define which viewers can see which
albums and also mechanisms for how those viewers are
notified when new content that is meant for them is
published. This is the sharing model that I orginally
planned when I started Pixory and also the sharing
model that a couple of Pixory users requested many,
many months ago (you can find the reference if you
browse back through the yahoo group archive).

Further out, I plan to provide alternative means for
organizing photos and albums and mechanisms that allow
for presenting albums and photos according to those
means. This would include sorting and searching
according to criteria other than chronology.

However, I don't believe that a hierarchy is a good
means for organizing documents/photos. There has been
a tremendous amount of research in this area that
demonstrates the inadequacy of hierarchies for
organizing personal information. Even Microsoft
recognizes this and is moving away from hierarchy for
their next generation filesystem (WinFS). I'd be happy
to provide you with pointers to reference material on
the subject. Basically, there are two major problems
with hierarchies:

1) There's only 1 hierarchy, so a document can only go
in 1 place in the hierarchy. But most personal
information has many different aspects to it that
dont' allow it to neatly fit in a single place in a
hierarchical classification. For instance, suppose I
visit friends in Japan and take lots of pictures.
Should I classify them as "travel", or should I
classify them under "places", or should I classify
them under the "people" that I visited, or should I
classify them under the "things" that we did (like
bullet train rides and Zen gardens), or should they go
under "when" I was there, etc.

2) Any classification system is artificial and highly
subjective. A single hierarchy is likely to only fully
make sense to the original author, and even then is
imperfect. For instance, if I devise a hierarchy for
my pictures, once my collection gets quite large it
becomes difficult for even me to remember (guess)
where I classified a particular document/picture. And
it's much worse for visitors. My hierarchy might make
very little sense to a visitor and they might have a
very difficult time trying to guess where stuff is in
the hierarchy. Maybe not a big problem for small
collections, but a huge problem for big collections.

For these reasons, I'm biased against hierarchies.
Instead, I plan to do something more along the lines
of Apple's iPhoto, where albums can be 'tagged' with
multiple 'attributes'. Then you can search, sort and
present according to these attributes.

I'm sorry that we're currently stuck with a dumbed
down "hierarchy lite", but I view this as an
evolutionary stage towards something better. I may
make some user requested improvements to the existing
scheme (like cascading attributes), but the more time
I spend twiddling the existing scheme, the less time I
have towards making bigger improvements.

regards,

joe



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