[ge-talk] today screen

[Adrian Sanabria]

I like the idea. I always found the Today screen kind of useful in Outlook,
but the problem was that I always needed to navigate away from it to do
something. So, it would go like this:

1. Start up Outlook
2. See something important
3. Immediately navigate away from the Today screen
4. Never come back to it and see anything else.

However, I've found a good solution in Outlook 2007. Instead of having a
screen that shows you everything, and allows you to do nothing without
leaving, they've added a mini calendar, to do list, etc that you can retract
or expand to use about 25% of the screen (by default, it is a user
configurable frame), and you can interact with them without leaving your
email.

This has been the perfect solution for me, and I think it could be taken
even a step further. The problem I still have in Outlook 2007 is that when I
want to pull up the calendar or to do lists as full screen items, I
completely lose sight of my email. Now that I'm in the Calendar, I want to
reference an email, or drag and drop one to create an appointment, but email
is all hidden now.

I think the answer is to create the ability to see all the major components,
regardless of which one has the majority of focus. For example:

Mail has focus (To do and Calendar are accessible in sidebar)
To do has focus (Mail and Calendar are accessible in sidebar)
Calendar has focus (Mail and To do are accessible in sidebar)

Now, you never need to change the primary focus to perform small tasks, and
much time and effort is saved (especially when you log a lot of time with
the application or interface in question).

--Adrian

On 1/25/07, Ari Haviv <arielbhaviv at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Tasks would also mean things you set your computer to do. For example,
> you may have a script that is scheduled to go off at a certain time.
> Maybe you figured out how to get the pc to water your plants or record
> a show with your tv tuner? That task should also be on the list.
>
>
> On 1/24/07, Ari Haviv <arielbhaviv at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Today I read http://dot.kde.org/1169588301/
> > on how KDE plans to combine all the computer tasks and put them in one
> interface
> > This is a good idea for tracking those long operations.
> >
> > Apple's plans for Leopard includes a To-do server so that you can make
> > a 'to-do' from any app
> >
> > But what I really like is the Today screen in a pocket pc. So the idea
> > would be that on one glance on your desktop, you'd know that today is
> > Mike's birthday, you have to finish the report by 5 and it's now 4:30,
> > you have 5 new emails and 4 new rss headlines and perhaps what the
> > weather is like right now or how your entire portfolio is doing. Or
> > perhaps if that ebay site you're interested in has changed
> >
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