4jan01 thot about 14dec00 thot: Hmm, with movement of prefs to options menu, I'm not sure about the tabbing dialog any more. We may want to put a prefs menu back, with `Edit Prefs' being tool prefs versus the top-level `Options' menu being data prefs. I'm not sure the distinction is worth making, so I guess we have to think about this some more.

14dec00 thot (and I think it's quite a good one): organize preferences into a tabbing dialog with exactly one tab for each menu.

Among the other options, there should be some for little things. Here's the beginnings of a list:

• (yes/no) remind on File Save As -- turn on/off the reminder about only the default calendar name being used for group scheduling purpose.

• day time granularity
• displayed times of the day
• displayed days of the week

Potpourri:

• default amount of reminder redisplay time.

Provide a dialog that looks like this:

OUT:

    Accept Calendar Tool Meeting Notifications from the leaders of these groups:
        * all
        * specific group list, with a radio button beside each, scrollable in
          case there are a large number of groups defined
        * none
:TUO (see "NO" paragraph below)

    Accept Email Meeting Notifications from the leaders of these groups:
        * all
        * specific group list, with a radio button beside each, scrollable in
          case there are a large number of groups defined
        * none

    Accept Email Meeting Meeting Notificaions from new groups you're added to:
        * yes
        * no

    Accept Meeting Notifications from these individuals:
        * all
        * specific user list
        * none

So, here's a nice happy medium -- the leader of a group for whom meeting requiests are turned off is notifed when the turn off happens. This may be getting overly complicated, but hey, so are a number of things.

NO, screw the happy medium -- users CANNOT decline meeting notification from the leaders of groups they're members of, only email notifications. If they're gonna participate in the Cal Tool community, they're on the hook for receiving meeting notifications.

NO, NO, users can turn off notifications, as imprudent as it may be. See latest version of meeting scheduling section.

The ability to accept meeting request from individuals effectively allow Cal Sys users the ability to establish unoffical groups, by establishing mutual acceptance of meeting requests.

Some question/details pursuant to the above dialog idea:

1. Should a user be able to acccept meeting requests from the leader of a group she's not a member of? Well, this doesn't really make much sense, because if she's not a member, then she won't normally be sent a meeting requesnt for that group, so it looks like the answer is "no". This means that a user is only asked to accept

2. The radio-buttoned of groups list should probably be in tree form, since it will allow the user to select subgroups by clicking on a parent group.

3. ... probably more to say here.

To be consistent with the way things are explained in specific-date-viewing, the default level cannot be at the item level. Nor do I think it makes particuarly good sense to have it be some list. Therefore, the default initial view level is one of four day through year levels, and perhaps a "no window" option. Remember also the bit about the initialization file and how it deals with the default view level always happening, including how a "no window" option value affects things initialization-filewise.

2.7.3.2. List Length

The length of each of the four categories of list is controlled by the dialog shown in figure 147. The dialog controls allow the user to specify the number of items before and after a specified date. For example, the dialog settings shown in Figure 147 show the user having specified the following format for the display of item lists:

• the appointments list is 100 elements long, starting with today's date
• the meetings list is 75 elements long, starting at seven days before today
• the length of the task list is unlimited, i.e., all tasks currently scheduled in the calendar are displayed in the task list
• the length of the events list is 25 elements long, starting with today's date

Hmm ... now that I'm doing this, I'm thinking that maybe we should just make this part of the regular filtering section, so that we maintain orthogonality. We need to think about this. An immediate question in this regard is do we really need to provide both a list-length feature as well as start/end date means to specify the number of items in a list. Curiously, this is pretty much the same concept as specifying start/end versus start/duration item lengths.

2.7.3.3. Other Lists Options

[NOTE: This category of options is not in the current menu. Deal with this discrepancy accordingly.]

Possibles:

• notifiy/don't notify when added to a group
• how/if to be notified of various things (options are zero or more of: (1) email (2) on-screen at start up (3) on-screen any time (4) on-screen at exit):
  • meeting being scheduled
  • becoming a member of a group
  • if group leader, attendee deleting a meeting

2.7.5. Advanced Options

[NOTE: This category of options is not in the current menu. Deal with this discrepancy accordingly.]

A useful but low priority option would be to find all events that have reminders turned on. This would be useful to me because I may have accidently turned on a reminder when I didn't want to, or forgot to turn on a reminder for something I should have. Anyway, this is a low priority requirement.