Tuesday, September 8, 2009

How many objects do we need?

One of the interesting, and potentially invaluable concepts that the Chandler project brought to light (i.e. to my attention ) was the idea of "stamping". The concept of stamping is the idea of defining incoming data by assigning it a type. When someone is simply typing in some information quickly, it by default goes into a note and then allows the user to stamp it as an event, or a task, or whatever else is needed.

A typical (though narrow) implementation of this concept is in the ability to take an e-mail that is an invitation and have the information be put into the calendar at the appropriate time. Microsoft Outlook allows e-mail's to be scheduled this way.

As far as I can tell, the Chandler project does this by displaying different facets of information in different contexts. This implies that the information is stored and "stamped" with several different types.

For example: someone may send you an evite to an event. You respond to the evite but keep the e-mail around as a reminder. If you liked the restaurant that the event occurred at you may decide to keep a note about the fact that you like that restaurant and you may also want to put the address of that restaurant into your contact list. In the Chandler world this is done by stamping the same piece of information twice. The first time it is stamped with the type "note" and the second time with the type "contact".

My apologies in advance if it turns out that I am misinterpreting the design notes for Chandler.

I think, the same thing could be achieved by creating new objects from the initial object and then maintaining associations between them. This would allow someone to create an event from an e-mail and the event would have a reference back to the original e-mail.

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