PDA

View Full Version : categories for meetings


yiparaki
December 6th, 2001, 03:20 PM
This is a request I have had for a while. It would be great if AN implements a) categories for meetings, and b) a view by category.

The need's description:
I almost always have some meetings that do not have an easy-to-specify pattern but they have an easy-to-specify conceptual theme. For example, I hold office hours for students (I am a university professor) that repeat from week to week but are intentionally chosen not to follow a pattern (to minimize scheduling conflicts with students). The way AN is now, it is not easy for me to answer the question "when do you have office hours?" (in order to do so I need to scan the whole week to answer fully). With AN 5.0, I realize that I *can* use the weekly block view with icons ans see them that way. But this assumes I have a single icon for such meetings and this is not always the case because there are sub-categories (and hence different icons) within the broader category.

Another example: when I go to a professional conference, I enter the talks I want to attend as meetings. These do not follow a "nice" pattern, so I cannot memorize them, I rely on my PDA. Again, the talks may fall into 4 or 5 different subcategories (by topic), but they can all be nicely classified under a category named "Conference".

Suggestion:
Have categories for meetings and a view for categories. I envision the view being a chronological list with one line per meeting (with its associated icon listed as well).

vidal
December 6th, 2001, 06:47 PM
Hi,

This is a very popular feature request. The main reason we have not added this so far is an inability to reliably get these sync'ed to the PC. Now, you might ask, icons dont sync to the PC but yet we have them in AN5. What is so different?

Icons dont sync but they dont appear in Outlook either. Unfortunately, categories on meetings do. If we add categories to meetings and they dont transfer properly to Outlook and vice versa there is a going to be a real flood of tech support emails saying "Categories on meetings are broken. Action Names is broken, buggy, etc." We dont want that until we can guarantee a solid solution to the problem.

Furthermore, there is a real risk that some of the conduits out there might just step on and destroy the categories in AN (if we store them in the regular place) because no one is expecting them.

Hope this helps explain some.

Vidal.