Dimensions?

[Clark Jones]

Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> 
> Christopher Browne writes:
>  > On Wed, 27 Sep 2000 10:46:27 +1000, the world broke into rejoicing as
[...]
>  > ... And in perhaps-overly-brief response to the multiply-expressed
>  > question,
>  >   "What if it's not a tree?"
[...]
> As for the user interface question, ideas are rolling around in the
> back of the head, but you're right, it is *nasty*.

Well, I have a thought on this, but first let me explain, briefly, my
situation:  I have two vehicles, a pickup and an RV, and so have things
like

auto:pickup:insurance
auto:pickup:repairs
auto:pickup:taxes
auto:RV:insurance
auto:RV:repairs
auto:RV:taxes

and I have

home:insurance
home:maintenance
home:taxes:irrigation_district
home:taxes:realestate

and so on.

One of the reports that I'd like to see would group together all of the
related stuff across the vehicles (and ignore anything related to home),
while another report would say, in essence, here's what I've spent on
insurance this year, and here's what I've spent on taxes, and so on.

Anyway, as for the [ab]user interface, I've seen several instances around
of two windows where "here's what's currently selected for inclusion" and
"these items are not currently included" -- you click on one to highlight
it, and then click on the arrow that's between the two columns to move it.

What I would envision is that when you're setting up/modifying a report,
you would create new "catagory" (or some appropriate word) (or possibly
select an existing one if modifying an existing report) and then you
would get the "two column" included/not included display described in the
previous paragraph.  (We might want to include a "check box" that the user
could check to only allow a given account to only appear on one catagory,
and possibly also a choice between "ignore unselected accounts"/"report
unselected accounts as an error"/"put unselected accounts into a default
'misc.' catagory".)

I think that such a user interface could be made both sufficiently general
as to satisfy the vast majority of people's needs, and is also relatively
intuitive if the GUI is set up correctly.

There are, of course, many "implementation details", such as the need to
allow the user to have multiple reports set up, an easy/intuitive way of
selecting things like "date ranges" (including an "all before"!), what to
do about new accounts that have been created since the last time the report
was run, just how we represent the report on disk, and so on.  Also, when
selecting accounts, we'd want to (eventually) be able to select multiple
accounts (with shift lmb and control lmb), and maybe even a way to "select
accounts based on a regular expression" (after all, this _IS_ a "Unix-like"
OS :-).

Remember, a conclusion is where you got tired of thinking -- this is my
conclusion.  :-)
						Clark
-- 
Disclaimer:  The opinions expressed herein are mine and not necessarily
those of anyone else.  (As if anyone else would want them!)

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