A plea for "real" tagging

[rmunn]

I've wanted tags in Tomboy for a long time, and I remember being
excited back in 2007 when I saw that people were working on
implementing them. Great, I thought, by late 2007 or early 2008 I'll
finally be able to get an updated Tomboy with tagging. But 2008 came
and went, and no tags. There was a new "Notebooks" feature, but a note
could only go in one notebook at a time, so this was basically a
glorified folder structure rather than "real" tagging. "I guess tags
are still being worked on," I thought.

Come mid-2009, and I finally get frustrated enough to search the
Tomboy history and find out what's holding up implementation of the
tagging feature. Lo and behold, I discover the following in the 0.9.3
release notes:

   * Removed tagging UI (superceded by Notebooks).

Notebooks, as they are currently implemented in Tomboy (notes can only
belong to a single notebook at a time) are essentially folders. The
question of tags vs. folders is one that has been pondered many times,
and there's not much new I can add to the discussion. A few links to
discussions of the pros and cons of tags and folders:

http://www.osomac.com/2009/07/05/tags-vs-folders/
http://www.organizepictures.com/2007/11/tags-vs-folders-the-big-debate
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/organizing-chaos-folders-labels-search.html

When I searched for the reason why notebooks were made into folders
rather than tags, I could not find any evidence that this decision had
been deeply considered, or that the pros and cons above were pondered.
This does not mean that thought wasn't given to the issue, of course,
only that my Google-fu was unequal to the task of finding such
discussions if they exist. The only relevant discussions I found were:
1) the IRC log at the bottom of
http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Notebooks, where it seems like the
rationale for "notebooks shall be folders rather than tags" was only
"notes in two notebooks at once is confusing" (apparently to both
users and developers), along with the fact that both participants in
the discussion had the same idea, to make notebooks into folders
rather than tags, at the same time. And 2)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=380634, which was closed as
WONTFIX, but doesn't state the rationale for restricting notes to a
single notebook. Its closing comment merely states "We opted to
provide Notebook support instead [of tags]."

What's especially frustrating to me is that the current implementation
is so *close* to what I want. When I click the Notebook button on a
note and see the list of notebooks with radio buttons next to them, I
think "Why, oh why, couldn't those be checkboxes instead?" If there's
a concern about confusing users (which is a *very* valid concern,
don't get me wrong -- I know some very bright people who are
near-computer-illiterate, and I appreciate GNOME's focus on keeping
things simple enough for those people to be able to use them) then an
option could be added. "Allow notes to exist in more than one
notebook" could be a good wording for the option.

Fortunately, Tomboy searching is implemented in such a way that I can
write "Tags: foo bar baz" at the start of a note and have it show up
in a search. However, there's no way for me to say "Given all notes
tagged with foo, what other tags do they have?" Look at how the
del.icio.us Firefox plugin is implemented for an example of what I
mean: click on the "foo" tag, and you get a submenu of all tags that
share at least one bookmark with "foo". That makes it really easy to
track down that one bookmark that you don't remember what it was
called, but it was about a security hole in, what program was it, it's
on the tip of your tongue -- just expand your "security" tag and the
sublist of tags that "intersect" with the security tag will probably
jog your memory.

Let me give one more example of why Tomboy searching, plus a "Tags:
foo bar baz" text line inside notes, isn't quite enough. Let's say I
keep Tomboy notes about people I want to visit, places I want to see,
etc., in different cities. So I have tags for "Chicago", "Dallas",
"New York", and so on. I also have tags for "friends", "customers",
"family", and another set of tags for "restaurants", "hiking",
"museums", "parks", you get the idea. That's a lot of tags. Six months
later, when I'm planning a trip to Chicago and want to figure out
where to eat the evening I arrive, am I going to remember which tags I
used? Did I use the tag "restaurant" or "fastfood" here? (Or was it
"fast-food"? The question of spelling and singular vs. plural is also
a problem for a text-line-and-search implementation of tags.)
Saturday's supposed to be a clear day and I want to do something
outside. So I search for "Chicago hiking" and "Chicago parks", but I
forget to search for "Chicago discgolf" or "Chicago disc-golf". Oops,
I missed some tags that would be relevant to my search, and I won't
even think about calling up my friend Joel who really enjoys disc
golfing. But with a "Here are some tags that intersect with the one
you've chosen" list, I would see the "disc-golf" tag and be reminded
about it.

So, I have two questions:

1) Is there any possibility of re-visiting the decision to implement
folders instead of tags? Or at least pondering the rationale for
having one vs. the other? If this discussion has already taken place,
then a link to the mailing-list archives would at least satisfy me
that serious thought has gone into this issue, rather than a major
decision being taken merely on the basis of "we both had the same idea
at the same time". But if there hasn't been serious thought given to
the advantages of tagging over folders (e.g., the multiple, orthogonal
categories like place and activity that a note could belong to, like
"Chicago disc-golf" in my example above), then I think that discussion
needs to happen.

2) If, even after discussion of the pros and cons, the decision is
made to keep notebooks as-is (as folders rather than as tags), would
there be any significant technical challenge in writing an add-on that
turned notebooks into a "real" tagging system? And if such an add-on
were written, would there be any objection to including it in the
default set of Tomboy add-ons, initially disabled but there for
advanced users to turn on as they wish?

--
Robin Munn
rmunn@...
GPG key 0x4543D577
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[eleusinian]

I agree that tags would be great, but in the interim, may I suggest a hack?

I wanted the ability to tag notes as "TODO".  So what I did was to create a note called "TODO" and put that text in each note I wanted to tag. Turn on the Backlinks plugin, and your TODO note suddenly lets you see everything marked TODO.

It's not perfect, of course -- specifically, you can't do set up unions of tags, etc. But it might help.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Robin Munn <rmunn@...> wrote:

I've wanted tags in Tomboy for a long time, and I remember being
excited back in 2007 when I saw that people were working on
implementing them. Great, I thought, by late 2007 or early 2008 I'll
finally be able to get an updated Tomboy with tagging. But 2008 came
and went, and no tags. There was a new "Notebooks" feature, but a note
could only go in one notebook at a time, so this was basically a
glorified folder structure rather than "real" tagging. "I guess tags
are still being worked on," I thought.

Come mid-2009, and I finally get frustrated enough to search the
Tomboy history and find out what's holding up implementation of the
tagging feature. Lo and behold, I discover the following in the 0.9.3
release notes:

  * Removed tagging UI (superceded by Notebooks).

Notebooks, as they are currently implemented in Tomboy (notes can only
belong to a single notebook at a time) are essentially folders. The
question of tags vs. folders is one that has been pondered many times,
and there's not much new I can add to the discussion. A few links to
discussions of the pros and cons of tags and folders:

http://www.osomac.com/2009/07/05/tags-vs-folders/
http://www.organizepictures.com/2007/11/tags-vs-folders-the-big-debate
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/organizing-chaos-folders-labels-search.html

When I searched for the reason why notebooks were made into folders
rather than tags, I could not find any evidence that this decision had
been deeply considered, or that the pros and cons above were pondered.
This does not mean that thought wasn't given to the issue, of course,
only that my Google-fu was unequal to the task of finding such
discussions if they exist. The only relevant discussions I found were:
1) the IRC log at the bottom of
http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Notebooks, where it seems like the
rationale for "notebooks shall be folders rather than tags" was only
"notes in two notebooks at once is confusing" (apparently to both
users and developers), along with the fact that both participants in
the discussion had the same idea, to make notebooks into folders
rather than tags, at the same time. And 2)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=380634, which was closed as
WONTFIX, but doesn't state the rationale for restricting notes to a
single notebook. Its closing comment merely states "We opted to
provide Notebook support instead [of tags]."

What's especially frustrating to me is that the current implementation
is so *close* to what I want. When I click the Notebook button on a
note and see the list of notebooks with radio buttons next to them, I
think "Why, oh why, couldn't those be checkboxes instead?" If there's
a concern about confusing users (which is a *very* valid concern,
don't get me wrong -- I know some very bright people who are
near-computer-illiterate, and I appreciate GNOME's focus on keeping
things simple enough for those people to be able to use them) then an
option could be added. "Allow notes to exist in more than one
notebook" could be a good wording for the option.

Fortunately, Tomboy searching is implemented in such a way that I can
write "Tags: foo bar baz" at the start of a note and have it show up
in a search. However, there's no way for me to say "Given all notes
tagged with foo, what other tags do they have?" Look at how the
del.icio.us Firefox plugin is implemented for an example of what I
mean: click on the "foo" tag, and you get a submenu of all tags that
share at least one bookmark with "foo". That makes it really easy to
track down that one bookmark that you don't remember what it was
called, but it was about a security hole in, what program was it, it's
on the tip of your tongue -- just expand your "security" tag and the
sublist of tags that "intersect" with the security tag will probably
jog your memory.

Let me give one more example of why Tomboy searching, plus a "Tags:
foo bar baz" text line inside notes, isn't quite enough. Let's say I
keep Tomboy notes about people I want to visit, places I want to see,
etc., in different cities. So I have tags for "Chicago", "Dallas",
"New York", and so on. I also have tags for "friends", "customers",
"family", and another set of tags for "restaurants", "hiking",
"museums", "parks", you get the idea. That's a lot of tags. Six months
later, when I'm planning a trip to Chicago and want to figure out
where to eat the evening I arrive, am I going to remember which tags I
used? Did I use the tag "restaurant" or "fastfood" here? (Or was it
"fast-food"? The question of spelling and singular vs. plural is also
a problem for a text-line-and-search implementation of tags.)
Saturday's supposed to be a clear day and I want to do something
outside. So I search for "Chicago hiking" and "Chicago parks", but I
forget to search for "Chicago discgolf" or "Chicago disc-golf". Oops,
I missed some tags that would be relevant to my search, and I won't
even think about calling up my friend Joel who really enjoys disc
golfing. But with a "Here are some tags that intersect with the one
you've chosen" list, I would see the "disc-golf" tag and be reminded
about it.

So, I have two questions:

1) Is there any possibility of re-visiting the decision to implement
folders instead of tags? Or at least pondering the rationale for
having one vs. the other? If this discussion has already taken place,
then a link to the mailing-list archives would at least satisfy me
that serious thought has gone into this issue, rather than a major
decision being taken merely on the basis of "we both had the same idea
at the same time". But if there hasn't been serious thought given to
the advantages of tagging over folders (e.g., the multiple, orthogonal
categories like place and activity that a note could belong to, like
"Chicago disc-golf" in my example above), then I think that discussion
needs to happen.

2) If, even after discussion of the pros and cons, the decision is
made to keep notebooks as-is (as folders rather than as tags), would
there be any significant technical challenge in writing an add-on that
turned notebooks into a "real" tagging system? And if such an add-on
were written, would there be any objection to including it in the
default set of Tomboy add-ons, initially disabled but there for
advanced users to turn on as they wish?

--
Robin Munn
rmunn@...
GPG key 0x4543D577
_______________________________________________
Tomboy-list mailing list
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http://lists.beatniksoftware.com/listinfo.cgi/tomboy-list-beatniksoftware.com

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[Sandy Armstrong]

Hi Robin,

I'm out of the country right now so I will not be able to give you a
good response until I return next week.  But I wanted to let you know
that I do intend to respond with a more in-depth rationale for why we
opted for Notebooks instead of tags, and plans for how I think we can
improve Notebooks.

I have always maintained that since Tomboy supports tagging
programatically (Notebooks are built on the internal support for
tagging), anybody is welcome to revive the original Tagging Add-In
(which is still in git, but could use some UI work) and distribute it
themselves.

That being said, if anybody else has input on this, I'd love to hear
it.  Promise I'll respond in more detail next week.  :-)

Thanks,
Sandy

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:52 PM, Robin Munn<rmunn@...> wrote:

> I've wanted tags in Tomboy for a long time, and I remember being
> excited back in 2007 when I saw that people were working on
> implementing them. Great, I thought, by late 2007 or early 2008 I'll
> finally be able to get an updated Tomboy with tagging. But 2008 came
> and went, and no tags. There was a new "Notebooks" feature, but a note
> could only go in one notebook at a time, so this was basically a
> glorified folder structure rather than "real" tagging. "I guess tags
> are still being worked on," I thought.
>
> Come mid-2009, and I finally get frustrated enough to search the
> Tomboy history and find out what's holding up implementation of the
> tagging feature. Lo and behold, I discover the following in the 0.9.3
> release notes:
>
>   * Removed tagging UI (superceded by Notebooks).
>
> Notebooks, as they are currently implemented in Tomboy (notes can only
> belong to a single notebook at a time) are essentially folders. The
> question of tags vs. folders is one that has been pondered many times,
> and there's not much new I can add to the discussion. A few links to
> discussions of the pros and cons of tags and folders:
>
> http://www.osomac.com/2009/07/05/tags-vs-folders/
> http://www.organizepictures.com/2007/11/tags-vs-folders-the-big-debate
> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/organizing-chaos-folders-labels-search.html
>
> When I searched for the reason why notebooks were made into folders
> rather than tags, I could not find any evidence that this decision had
> been deeply considered, or that the pros and cons above were pondered.
> This does not mean that thought wasn't given to the issue, of course,
> only that my Google-fu was unequal to the task of finding such
> discussions if they exist. The only relevant discussions I found were:
> 1) the IRC log at the bottom of
> http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Notebooks, where it seems like the
> rationale for "notebooks shall be folders rather than tags" was only
> "notes in two notebooks at once is confusing" (apparently to both
> users and developers), along with the fact that both participants in
> the discussion had the same idea, to make notebooks into folders
> rather than tags, at the same time. And 2)
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=380634, which was closed as
> WONTFIX, but doesn't state the rationale for restricting notes to a
> single notebook. Its closing comment merely states "We opted to
> provide Notebook support instead [of tags]."
>
> What's especially frustrating to me is that the current implementation
> is so *close* to what I want. When I click the Notebook button on a
> note and see the list of notebooks with radio buttons next to them, I
> think "Why, oh why, couldn't those be checkboxes instead?" If there's
> a concern about confusing users (which is a *very* valid concern,
> don't get me wrong -- I know some very bright people who are
> near-computer-illiterate, and I appreciate GNOME's focus on keeping
> things simple enough for those people to be able to use them) then an
> option could be added. "Allow notes to exist in more than one
> notebook" could be a good wording for the option.
>
> Fortunately, Tomboy searching is implemented in such a way that I can
> write "Tags: foo bar baz" at the start of a note and have it show up
> in a search. However, there's no way for me to say "Given all notes
> tagged with foo, what other tags do they have?" Look at how the
> del.icio.us Firefox plugin is implemented for an example of what I
> mean: click on the "foo" tag, and you get a submenu of all tags that
> share at least one bookmark with "foo". That makes it really easy to
> track down that one bookmark that you don't remember what it was
> called, but it was about a security hole in, what program was it, it's
> on the tip of your tongue -- just expand your "security" tag and the
> sublist of tags that "intersect" with the security tag will probably
> jog your memory.
>
> Let me give one more example of why Tomboy searching, plus a "Tags:
> foo bar baz" text line inside notes, isn't quite enough. Let's say I
> keep Tomboy notes about people I want to visit, places I want to see,
> etc., in different cities. So I have tags for "Chicago", "Dallas",
> "New York", and so on. I also have tags for "friends", "customers",
> "family", and another set of tags for "restaurants", "hiking",
> "museums", "parks", you get the idea. That's a lot of tags. Six months
> later, when I'm planning a trip to Chicago and want to figure out
> where to eat the evening I arrive, am I going to remember which tags I
> used? Did I use the tag "restaurant" or "fastfood" here? (Or was it
> "fast-food"? The question of spelling and singular vs. plural is also
> a problem for a text-line-and-search implementation of tags.)
> Saturday's supposed to be a clear day and I want to do something
> outside. So I search for "Chicago hiking" and "Chicago parks", but I
> forget to search for "Chicago discgolf" or "Chicago disc-golf". Oops,
> I missed some tags that would be relevant to my search, and I won't
> even think about calling up my friend Joel who really enjoys disc
> golfing. But with a "Here are some tags that intersect with the one
> you've chosen" list, I would see the "disc-golf" tag and be reminded
> about it.
>
> So, I have two questions:
>
> 1) Is there any possibility of re-visiting the decision to implement
> folders instead of tags? Or at least pondering the rationale for
> having one vs. the other? If this discussion has already taken place,
> then a link to the mailing-list archives would at least satisfy me
> that serious thought has gone into this issue, rather than a major
> decision being taken merely on the basis of "we both had the same idea
> at the same time". But if there hasn't been serious thought given to
> the advantages of tagging over folders (e.g., the multiple, orthogonal
> categories like place and activity that a note could belong to, like
> "Chicago disc-golf" in my example above), then I think that discussion
> needs to happen.
>
> 2) If, even after discussion of the pros and cons, the decision is
> made to keep notebooks as-is (as folders rather than as tags), would
> there be any significant technical challenge in writing an add-on that
> turned notebooks into a "real" tagging system? And if such an add-on
> were written, would there be any objection to including it in the
> default set of Tomboy add-ons, initially disabled but there for
> advanced users to turn on as they wish?
>
> --
> Robin Munn
> rmunn@...
> GPG key 0x4543D577
> _______________________________________________
> Tomboy-list mailing list
> Tomboy-list@...
> http://lists.beatniksoftware.com/listinfo.cgi/tomboy-list-beatniksoftware.com
>

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[rmunn]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Sandy
Armstrong<sanfordarmstrong@...> wrote:
> I have always maintained that since Tomboy supports tagging
> programatically (Notebooks are built on the internal support for
> tagging), anybody is welcome to revive the original Tagging Add-In
> (which is still in git, but could use some UI work) and distribute it
> themselves.

When you say it's still in git, do you mean that the code still exists
in master/HEAD of git://git.gnome.org/tomboy? Or is it in a file
that's been deleted and I'll have to do some digging through the
history to find it? (And if it's the latter, could you save me some
work and tell me what filename(s) I should be looking for?)

On the subject of a good tagging UI, I've given it a bit of thought
over the past months. I like some things about the del.icio.us plugin,
but I don't like the use of spaces as separators. Some two-word
phrases lend themselves to abbreviations well (like "winxp" instead of
"Windows XP") but some don't. The use of commas strikes me as a good
choice.

I also like the idea of having easy access to an existing tags list,
so that you can just check off tags this item should belong to, but
the volume could easily get overwhelming if you're using tags
extensively. Two possible solutions to the volume problem: most-often
used tags "bubble" to the top of the list, or you can type a few
letters to filter down the list of checkboxes to just the tags that
start with the letters you've typed so far. Arrow keys would scroll
within the filtered set of tags, and either space or Enter would
select one (don't know yet which would be more intuitive).

Another possibility: instead of using a checkbox, users enter tags
into a simple textbox -- in which case, tab- or comma-completion of
existing tags is a good idea. (With a highlighted bit of auto-complete
text to show the user what Tomboy thinks s/he is trying to type. BTW,
anyone know if autocomplete, or rather AutoComplete, is a trademarked
term?)


And while I'm thinking about UI, I've a comment to make on the
Notebooks UI as well. (I'll probably enter it into Bugzilla once I
send off this email). The "Notebooks >" menu entry in the panel menu
is missing functionality I was expecting to be there. If I create two
notebooks, "Foo" and "Bar", and put some notes in them, why don't they
show up as submenus under the "Notebooks >" submenu? I was expecting
as menu structure:

Notebooks > Foo > New "Foo" Note (and below, all the notes I filed under Foo)
Notebooks > Bar > New "Bar" Note (and below, all the notes I filed under Bar)

Instead, I have to click on "Search All Notes" to get to someplace
where I can narrow down my search to just Foo or just Bar. This is
completely counterintuitive to me, and breaks the Rule of Least
Surprise twice; I was expecting those to show up as submenus under the
"Notebooks >" menu (surprise #1: they didn't), and it's only because I
went hunting that I found the functionality at all (surprise #2: I
wasn't expecting it to be under "Search All Notes").

--
Robin Munn
rmunn@...
GPG key 0x4543D577
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[Michael Sullivan]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Robin Munn wrote:

> Another possibility: instead of using a checkbox, users enter tags
> into a simple textbox -- in which case, tab- or comma-completion of
> existing tags is a good idea. (With a highlighted bit of auto-complete
> text to show the user what Tomboy thinks s/he is trying to type. BTW,
> anyone know if autocomplete, or rather AutoComplete, is a trademarked
> term?)

A quick search at the US Patent and Trade Office website shows that no
one has ever held a trademark on AutoComplete.  I'm no lawyer, but that
seems encouraging.
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&state=4004:5jg3df.1.1

- - Michael Sullivan
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