tigert.com | my life and stuff

Speaking of dates, I have been working on a design for an IM log viewer for Beagle (well, it would be in Gaim ideally of course) and how to make it easier to use.

This is how the Gaim viewer currently looks. It does sort the logs by date, but each item is in a tree, and the tree is collapsed by default, so it is hard to browse it through. Basically it allows you to view your logs of course, and there is a search. So not that bad.

So how to improve it? This is my attempt:

For the most part it is the same, but there are a few small but important details:

• The dates are shown in “this week notation”, with more categories for recent items (”today”, “yesterday” and “this week”, “this month”)
• Instead of showing “Fri 19 Nov 2004 10:33:05 PM EET” for the log entry, actually show a snippet of the beginning of the log - it makes it much more identifiable when you can see the content.

Of course some intelligent stuff needs to be figured out so the logs wouldnt show “hey dude?” for each log But maybe show the first line that is longer than a two words? Or something like that.

Also, show the time for the log entry in the list only if that day has more than one log, otherwise just the date is good. The log view part of the window or statusbar can show more detailed information, it does not need to be visible for all of those logs at once. Too much detail in a list of several items makes it just cluttered very easily, and once you have hundreds of logs it becomes a nightmare to find stuff.

Editors note: Of course the “show all logs” button should be “Find” before you do a search, ignore that part for now

By the way - what if there was a Nautilus view that queries Beagle for file info and sorts them in a list view based on this date idea? I think I might like it a lot in practice.

I often just sort by modification date in file dialogs and Nautilus to find the recent stuff - there are a LOT of files on my folders, I am lazy to sort them into folders (then I’d need to search for folders first - and scanning through the last modified order just seems to work best.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2004 at 11:58 and is filed under software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.