Comment 15 for bug 336604

Yeah, as I said in the original blueprint, double clicking on a task would
just do what it does now - open it in a new window. I think that people can
easily cope with having multiple editing windows open - after all, only one
of them will have focus at any one time and window managers generally make
it pretty clear which one that is. It's generally not a good idea to assume
that your users are dumb - assume that they're smart but very busy. I think
that having single click access to task details in a sidebar would
streamline the workflow for busy people.

I would envisage the task details sidebar being optional, just like the tags
sidebar currently is. That way users could choose whether they wanted to
show it or not. If it wasn't displayed - which could well be the default, if
you like - then things would work exactly as they do now.

This leads two usage scenarios which I'm not sure would overlap much - the
current one: double click, open many windows and the new one: single click,
only one window. I would guess that these scenarios would probably be mostly
exclusive - people would either fall into one or the other pattern. If
that's the case, then mostly people actually won't have multiple editing
windows visible anyway - they'll probably either just use the details
sidebar, or just use the current setup, without much of both going on. Like
you said though - this is probably something that you're only going to find
out by trying it and then (somehow) measuring if you really want to know.
There's a fascinating blog series from the guys who rebuilt the MS Office
2007 UI from the ground up which shows why they made the decisions that they
did. It also covers the amount of instrumentation data that they collected
about how people actually use their software. It's worth a read for it's own
sake but it's a really interesting look into user and data driven UI design:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/pages/table-of-contents.aspx

Also, yes the mockup I made is kinda wide but as people have mentioned, I
have an (increasingly common) widescreen monitor. It doesn't have to be wide
though - I didn't resize anything much, but it could be made quite a bit
narrower and still be perfectly functional. You could also put the details
pane somewhere else - below the task list for example, if wideness is a
concern.

Cheers,
Dunc

2009/3/11 Dave Crossland <email address hidden>

> If they are always synced, I don't see how its confusing many tools have
> 'duplicate window' features, inkscape and emacs ones I use daily :)
>
> Regards, Dave
>
> On 11 Mar 2009, 10:55 AM, "fonji" <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> Well you'll have the same task opened and editable in the third pane and in
> an optional new window...
> Which is confusing.
>
> I agree with Lionel Dricot, you should have at max one editing display
> per task.
>
> -- option to keep tasks in a single window instead of popups
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/33660...
>
> --
> option to keep tasks in a single window instead of popups
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/336604
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>
>