Saturday, February 24, 2007

Shoving objects to the side of the board

This new feature extends the metaphor of a desk. Imagine now, you're sitting at your desk. Now imagine you have several desks around you, and at any time you can swivel between them with your fancy leather padded chair (I program in high class ;). That has been the inspiration of the buckets at the bottom of the screen as they are currently implemented.

Now imagine the metaphor that as you're piecing together your design, you suddenly have a piece of it that you don't want to see right now, so you shove it off to the side of your desk. At any time, you can reach over to it, but literally it's off to the side. This is the inspiration behind the new feature.

The "off to the side" buckets will exist on the right hand side of the screen. At any time, you can highlight a group of objects, then drag them to a "bucket" on the right hand side of the screen. The selected objects will be cut from your current diagram, and you'll see a tiny little preview of it in the "off the side" bucket on the right hand side. You can drag these back on at any time to your current work space.

Here's a snippet of Alex's interpretation: *one* direction, of many, you could go with this is that you are at a desk, and in the top left corner are objects, like a pen holder, and a little ticker tape (either as icons, or as part of an actual good-looking background image) that when you mouse over, expand into concepts and undos respectively, and on the right are little drawers that are closed, like into the side of the desk which is offscreeen, so all you see are little handles and drawer-fronts, and when you mouse over them, they open and have design parts inside, and the bottom of the screen, metaphorically enough, represents pushing away from the desk and going to another one (though presumably all your tools would come with you, undos and such) so the metaphor breaks a little there.

There are a few problems, like links drawn between objects that are taken out. I can just assume all links to the object that was cut out are removed. That would be simple, I'll have to do some practical tests to see if it works.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This sounds somewhat familiar to Francois' work - objects shoved to the side don't go in a bucket, but shrink to be out of the way.