[Psi-devel] Our Commercial Competitor

[textshell-I1QKlO at neutronstar.dyndns.org]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 10:09:10PM +0200, Francisco Joaquín Rodríguez Prados wrote:
> 2005/6/27, Hal Rottenberg <halr9000 at gmail.com>:
> > Well that is personal preference of course.  But I think what Fran and
> > Mircea have discussed here before are what would work best for Psi.
> > It's not as complex.  It's "just history", but with a much better
> > interface than we have now.
> 
> We had a big thread about the history thingy, and the "Message
> Manager" was born there, with a lot of good ideas from Mircea, Maciek
> or Przemo - among others. The manager looks good to me in the way it
> was defined.
> 
> When I read the link Nolan pasted here, I thought maybe that was too
> much for a simple history manager. Bookmarks, calendars... everything
> seems to be really fancy. But I think it's more fancy than useful.
> 
> Have you ever navigated through your history by days, remembering what
> you typed the 27th of June, and then the 28th... last year? Then, the
> calendar makes no sense.

Besides a good text search, i'd say navigation by date seems to be the most
usefull kind of navigation. It's certainly better then using a scrollbar or
selecting a "page" by number. 
Maybe I know I chatted about something just a bit after someone's birthday,
or "back in May"?

> It takes a lot of space. And every navigation
> element complicates a step more the navigation.

Sure, maybe it doesn't need to take as much space.

> So I would just throw
> away non useful navigation elements. Have you ever needed to find the
> same history element more than once? I don't think so. (And if you
> *found* it once, you will do it twice, with a good search engine.)
> Then, you don't need the bookmarks. Bookmarks management is heavy. Oh
> come on... A graphic showing the "density" of messages per hour... No
> comments.

If someone would ask me, the density is not that useful, but some
indication long breaks in the chatflow in the main dialog seem useful. Not
only in the history dialog.
Maybe a blank line if nothing was logged for a hour?
(I might try this in my patched local build for the chat dialog anyway ;))

> 
> Maybe I'm wrong and people like this history navigation tool. I do
> that kind of navigation in the personal weblog I write with a friend,
> but not in my history. But maybe people start taking care of their
> history and starts putting bookmarks in their favourite conversation
> points.

I might start doing so, if possible ;) (that is, bookmarking some more
serious talk, or remote debugging sessions)

But these are all more nice to have features. What is really needed it more
basic and more important.
As long as "less" in a terminal is easier than the history i agree, that
these features are not high priority.

> 
> In my opinion, I would invest my time doing a pretty "export to HTML"
> function, rather than adding bookmarking capability. But as I said,
> all this was just my opinion.
> 

This would be at least as useful as the rest. Maybe someone how likes one
of these features will just develop a patch, as soon as the basic new
Dialog is in darcs.


   - Martin.