Re: [Sum] Contacts Design

On Tuesday 10 July 2007 17:55:13 Mimi wrote:
>
> Some issues that come up with this.

[jumping to the final question because my answer will partly cover the 
preceding questions too]

> 4. How do I navigate between a contacts and all the items that point
> to a contact and vice versa? There are infinite possibilities here.

I imagine that this could work a lot like search, except it would be 
accessible from the contact itself, for example as an option in the 
context menu or a button in its DV. The effect would be to populate the 
summary view with items linked to the contact -- and, just like when 
searching, the user would have an option to turn this search into a 
collection. Furthermore, the view would be filterable by the app area, 
so I could see all items referencing Mimi, or just the tasks, etc. 
Bonus points for supporting this as a separate kind of search in the 
quick entry widget, sort of like GMail (e.g., "/ref davor").

> Do you have some immediate use cases you'd like to satisfy? Keeping
> track of whom you're waiting for on any given item is one. There's
> the GTD @so-and-so agenda context. There's searching for stuff
> because you know it came from, went to or had something to do with
> someone....

These two alone are a significant chunk of basic GTD workflows, and I'd 
be a very happy camper if they were supported.

> 1. Are these contact groups dynamically generated (include every
> person that is referred to by items in this collection) OR manually
> pulled together? I can think of scenarios for both.

I'm not sure what contact groups might be. I don't think there are any 
in the "search" workflow I described above, and in general 
all "contact" items would live in the "Address book" OOTB collection, 
as shown in Ed's screenshots.

> 2. Are these groupings email aliases as well? That opens up a whole
> other can of worms wrt which email address to use in which context.
> For example, I have 1 contact in both Home and Work collections and I
> have personal and work email addresses for that contact, etc, etc.

Good question. I imagine there could be a per-collection policy defining 
the order of preference for choosing different email aliases.

> 3. If there is a contacts pane or contacts palette for each
> collection, then how do contacts show up in the main Triage Table
> View if you're triaging them?

Maybe a Contact is not a stamp then, but a different kind of item?

Davor
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