Collaboration and Sharing

These tasks should expose the need for easy search and easy sharing interface.

1. Miguel asks for a beagle 1.0 release schedule over IM
2. Nat needs to find the document on his local machine and find the apropriate section in the document
3. Nat needs to share the snipplet of text with Miguel

1. Tuomas asks for an image over IM
2. Jimmac needs to find the document on the local machine and
3. share it with Tuomas

Nat uses the search applet to find the document in question by typing “beagle release schedule”. Since he has a number of documents containing this string, he refines the search by adding “last week” to the query, since he knows he finalised the document sometime last week.

Because Nat wants to share only a snipplet of the text and not the complete document, he doubleclicks the name of the document to bring up OpenOffice.

Nat selects the part of the document that includes the release schedule and selects Edit>Share from the menu.

JImmac uses the quicksearch applet to find the image in question.

Jimmac drags the image from the quicksearch popup to the IM conversation window.

• Search functionality needs to be discoverable & accessible easily with a shortcut
• Search dialog should contain results so that it doesn’t need to be dismissed until the appropriate result is found
• Only a handful of results should be shown
• Usually you search for what and when
• Sharing should happen in the context of the result, or drag and drop to the IM window
• Widgets/Apps should have sharing capabilities (File manager, Textarea...)

• Stuff that might work with relatively little effort to get us started with something interesting:
  • Tomboy could sync via a wiki accross a group of people
  • People are using IM a lot for discussions while they are in the middle of something else..

• CommonBuddyList
• DesktopProfiles for away/busy/do-not-disturb
• Microsoft Sharepoint

Quicksilver Launcher for OSX

Alex's Tomboy