COLOUR Coding Revisted

[TiddlyTweeter]

I wanted to add more thoughts about COLOUR and push it a bit more.

Thomas > 7 - Applying colours to items would pose problems: a) how would a user apply them? any interface addon or code one would have to know would make the tool more complicated b) as your words imply a colourful list would break the minimalism.

Josiah >> 7 - Keeping the minimalism but adding a congruent sense of differentiation between items. Use COLOUR. A limited colour pallet drop-down of say, 4 colours, // DELETE-> on the left next to each item <-DELETE//

Thomas, I don't think colour would break minimalism at all. At the item level it would be a "useful visual differentiation with the lowest level of impact on the mechanics of the interface".

How would you add colour? At the point of creation. Checklist items are not re-entrant so in the interface the mechanism could be a paintbrush instead of the pen. Hover on it and it would produce a drop-down of the colours available. So the interface looks the same as it is now, except the pen has become a brush.

The interface requirements can be minimal since creating Checklist items is a "one way ticket" ... i.e. you write and wikitext them on first entry. Anything more and you have to manually edit anyway.

I'm not, of course, saying colour selection would be easy to do. I have no real grasp of what would be involved. But if doable without having to eat off your leg, its an enhancement that could be worth it, I think.

By way of example here is a clip of a specialist food list I created for my own use in a word processor that uses colour coding well to communicate to the shopper what to buy (green), what to be okay with (black) and what to try to avoid (red).

[tgrosinger]

You can already add color to list items the same way you can with any text in TiddlyWiki.

Try adding this as a list item

@@color:red;This has color!@@

[TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Tony. Thank you for showing how easy that is.

I'm still slightly wondering how to keep the minimalism of Checklist AND enhance its utility. When I used your WikiText example I suddenly realised what my issue was.

_Its having ways to enhance Checklist (if possible) without the user having to remember WikiText.

SO, my current suggestion shifts to CAN the input box be set to remember history?

I mean that all previous strings entered are automatically recorded (maybe to a data Tiddler) and displayed in a drop-down? So, for instance, if a user started to type "@..." a dropdown would appear that shows all items that start "@..." They would click the specific item and the item would appear in the entry area for completion.

I have no idea if this is doable.

Ask if what I am getting at is unclear.

[tgrosinger]

I think that would definitely be possible, but we would definitely want that to be an off-by-default feature since it would be storing potentially lots of information invisibly.

Perhaps it could just store the most recent 500 or something, rather than everything forever. @TiddlyTweeter could you move this suggestion into a new issue and perhaps close this one if you feel it is resolved?

Thank you