Date: 3 Sep 85 11:24 PDT From: Marshall.pasa Subject: Re: The notes we made and notefile analyses In-reply-to: Monty.pa's message of 1 Sep 85 18:26 PDT To: Monty.pa cc: marshall.pasa Format: TEdit Lissa, I'll append the document card made from our brainstorming notes to the end of this message. As you had guessed, I haven't had time to impose any additional organization or to perform any editing... But here they are. I'll take a look at your analysis fns - thanks for pointing me at them. Cathy --------------- Document from Brainstorming Session (Lissa and Cathy - 21 August) 1 Detail on Training System Fundamentals and Mechanics Booting, what the screen looks like when it comes up. What's a window, a mouse, a cursor, a menu, a tree menu (how to slide off), middle buttoning, getting different responses from same menu item selected with different mouse button.. strategies at this level, things like what general types of menus appear with what mouse buttons and what operations are available to you. Difference between window and background and nc menus. What's available in the environment. Chatting. Remote databases. General strategies when you have a problem, ways of saving your world (using the local disk, backing things up (to floppy, to file server), when to back things up), how you can tell active window (difference between cursor and caret), break windows, talk about system constraints like how many windows can I have at once, bitmap limit, known common bugs, idiosyncracies like a Tedit window that won't give up (how do you recover from this), prompt windows - general and window specific, where to look for help, hardcopying. How to use the documentation. Some kind of intro to "system tools/Othello/Hello" world. When to reboot, trying different things like logging out, in othello - cant load lisp - then reboot. Simplest way to start over and move back to cookbook procedure (from beginning). Simple Organizing Strategies Includes system image - how NoteCards presents itself - stuff like hierarchy (no circularity, strict vs. redundant - how do you deal with information you want to access from everywhere, the system-maintained fileboxes and how do they fit into the hierarchy, the concept of a notefile, simple scenario of how you would organize some familiar type of information, record-keeping where order (temporal by creation or date card is referring to) is important, alphabetical order is important, access-only (archival) stuff - templates, introducing some simple ideas about links eg. footnotes, references, and comments, simple titling strategies, reorganizing when changing tasks or tactics Second Phase of Training Scavenging, ask users for input on situations they've run into - record and answer. How do you do brainstorming in ncs using sketches, tedit, graphs. How to cut your losses when something goes awry. How NoteCards is a network, Browsing this network - techniques for creating meaningful browsers. How use a sketch (or a map(or a card ) or a graph) as an alternate filing context - how links fit into this - how system-defined links fit in, Save time and operations using system-defined links. {{you still have to file things anyway}}, advanced titling strategies, advanced reorganizing, multiple organizations (eg. for writing and arguing about same info) - how to browse these. How to do some simple system tailoring. Basic Functionality Making a document, searching for something (ways of searching for a card you've made - what are the most natural strategies and what's available NOW), card types and their editors (see TEdit Capabilities) Basic TEdit Capabilities Using shift-select, what's what on the keyboard, changing fonts, hardcopying (which kind of hardcopy to use - how a document card can be used as a hardcopy mechanism), invert-replace as opposed to selection - also invert-select. 2 Detail on Instrumentation Tracking Structure Tracking structural additions and changes, especially at a global level - looking for ways of building automated topic browser like Ken's. Cards/filebox, filebox/source Specialized observations about structure: sometimes a link will be redundant in that the cards will be filed in the same box or have the same source. link-based measures Tracking Card-Level Activity Maybe have a function running at card creation time (after TEdit is started up and things aren't so compute bound, a process could be initiated). Card (link) type, (link creation, deletion of cards or links). Say, see if browsers are deleted immediately or kept around (are they accessed anymore), how do people use their document cards (are they accessed anymore and in what capacity) Tracking Screen Management Screen management tracking, what command is used to perform a standard functions like collect children (we'll first have to identify all of the equivalent operations). What level menus do people use (eg. do they always go for second level functions; if so, you'd want to elevate them to first level). 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