From: Gabriel Horner <cldwalker@...>
Date: 2005-04-24T06:48:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Managing complexity and untangling my thoughts

Hi Hal,

> As one of the slides indicates, part of my confusion is different
> ways of thinking about what a "note" is.

I don't think I understand this confusion. The note itself should
just be text in the end. If it's stored in several different places, shouldn't
you have a parent class which knows how to extract notes from the different sources
via interface classes? I would personally prefer to keep the notes
in one storage format and write interface classes to all classes that need to access the notes.


> What are your mental (or other) tools for dealing with this sort
> of complexity?

  I don't if I'm answering your question but thought you might like to know of other Ruby
PIMs. Seeing that your project is based on Infoselect features, I take
it you're aware of outliners (for more on them see http://www.chwhat.com/pages/otl.html).
I've been actively using outliners for over two years, my current favorite being VimOutliner,
http://www.vimoutliner.org. Of the features you mention, it is definitely weak
in the searching and metadata areas. 

Thus, I've been experimenting with representing outlines
as tables and treating outlines as a hierarchy of tagged notes. Having recently picked up ruby, I've
made a rudimentary database shell which syncs outlines with tables and is giving outlines the
metadata capability I want. It's very alpha and is based on RubyonRails' ActiveRecord modules giving
me the MVC flexibility.  Let me know if you're interested. If you're fairly GUI-dependent, you
probably wouldn't find this interesting.

Gabriel
-- 
my looovely website -- http://www.chwhat.com
BTW, IF chwhat.com goes down email me at gabriel.horner@gmail.com