[tomboy-list] Suggestion/feature request

[Eric S. Johansson]

On 3/13/2011 8:47 PM, Adrian Gould wrote:
> If I could type a line in a list (and I could tell Tomboy I am making
> a list with a command key), write the line of text (or select it) and
> hit a shortcut combo - CTRL+1, CTRL+2 etc - and boom, the item was
> highlighted/labelled and best of all SORTED by priority rating.

I haven't spoken of this lately because the developers are probably tired of it. 
:-) The general case of what you are describing is what I call "smart paper". 
Smart paper has two sheets, a background or skeleton she which contains the 
everything you do information and the skin sheet which presents the results and 
takes inputs. If this is made complicated, you are solving the wrong problem.

I would solve it myself except my hands are broken and I can't type enough code.

The model, as I envision it, would be similar to the speech recognition friendly 
akasha notation.

[Body

This is an example the template body. You can include variables such as [reveal 
egg_drop]. You can also show the result of calculations like 3x5 which is 
[calculate 3x5]. But input such as:

address: [Textbox [initial your address here] user_address]

Would show up as a text box on the screen and the user could preload it with 
some dead if they wished. After user changes a field, all the calculations on 
the page are run and the results returned for display.
]

This is only a rough idea. Yes, there are problems but having lived with akasha, 
a bracket notation framework, I know it can work reasonably well.I see one 
problem is how do you trigger running calculations. User explicit or implied 
through time delay. If implied, then they need to cope with incomplete or 
erroneous data and how does that alter the display. Do you want the results of 
revealed to be able to be used as content modifying the display. I've lived with 
it both ways and I prefer reveal being able to modify the skeleton page 
dynamically. You can do some very nice things if you do.

As I think about it, we could probably take akasha and with a fair amount of 
modification to strip out the whole CGI mindset, we could make it a backend 
plug-in for tomboy. I would need some help and fingers to do that though. Could 
be interesting.

--- eric