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Re: Lists

#41

Post by danso »

state wrote: post #36
danso wrote: post #30

One of the favorite lists of all time -- in terms of both contemporary utility and in simplicity, is the MacRumors buyers guide: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ Maybe it was slapped together in a cumbersome way, but I can't imagine it having to be anything more complicated than 3 lists (or spreadsheets), if you're relatively anal about normalization: One for the list of products, one for the list of updates per pro…

That's a good example. But as you hint at: managing the content for that is probably pretty annoying for how simple it is.

What I meant was that it may have started out as cumbersome (i.e. someone's Word document)...but hopefully by now they've moved it to a spreadsheet-like format. Given that Macrumors is a well-established site, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't baked into their CMS as some kind of module...though it really could be done as a set of spreadsheets (or YAML) and then as a static site.

How long would it take to research every iPod-era-and-onwards Mac product line -- including dates of refreshes/announcements? I bet no more than a day...especially if you just start from the Wikipedia page, which needs some cleaning up of taxonomy, but is pretty good (and relatively machine-parseable):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._product...

There is definitely some editorial decision making that needs to be done about how to best classify things. But the Apple product line is pretty small, so the number of decisions -- e.g. should "iPod classic" and "iPod touch" be separate "families"/product-lines -- is relatively small.

After you have a list/spreadsheet of product-lines and dates...then it's not hard to write a script that calculates the number of days between each subsequent release...which gets you much of the main utility of the Macrumors' guide: days since last release, and average days per cycle.

(it'd actually be kind of cool to see this done with the major programming languages...)

Re: Lists

#42

Post by bambax »

yuxt wrote: post #20

workflowy is the best list and mostly underappreciated app.

Came here to say this... but actually, when I think about it, I use it much less than I could/should. It gets confusing after a while: you can't find the lists you have, and start making the same list over and over again (in my case, things to pack when going out on a photo trip).

It would help to be able to attach metadata to items, and especially to have the app record the date of each item, and then be able to sort all items by date (regardless of depth, etc.)

Re: Lists

#44

Post by bambax »

Excel is also the Mother of all list-making apps. From Spolsky (May 2000):

> When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn't even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000065....

Re: Lists

#45

Post by famousactress »

fomojola wrote: post #8

Odd: Pinterest seems to me like the breakout published list platform. No one said lists have to be words only: a Pinterest board is just a list with pictures.

I disagree. What makes a list a list (and not a group of cool shit) is that the list itself has (probably a lot) more value than the individual items. I'd argue the case that this is very rarely true of Pinterest boards, and Pinterest probably would also given the fact that it seems generally as a user you're confronted with a mashup of items from other people's boards, and not as often do you land on the board itself as a curated collection.

Re: Lists

#46

Post by stevesearer »

simonw wrote: post #13
fomojola wrote: post #8

Odd: Pinterest seems to me like the breakout published list platform. No one said lists have to be words only: a Pinterest board is just a list with pictures.

Completely agree: Pinterest feels very much to me like a "list" application that is a huge breakout success.

Yeah, I agree with this idea as well.

Pinterest boards are basically visual unordered lists with the default view of Pinterest bring focused on the items users can create lists with rather than of the particular lists on the site.

Re: Lists

#47

Post by 0898 »

Just out of curiosity, when did lists become a medium in their own right? To me, they're a formatting choice. Are 'lists' a thing?

Re: Lists

#48

Post by guiomie »

I thought it was a silly post at first, then I remembered I had in gmail draft emails for lists of: to read books, to watch movies, to never forget quotes, to never forget girlfriend related facts ... etc

Re: Lists

#49

Post by lifeisstillgood »

The most impressive list I came across recently was the FSF ethical gift guide - https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v6/

I have bought one item off it and am paused at the (no credit card, Romanian payment page) of another. But really the FSF could become the consumer guide for the net and I would happily read all their lists.

Re: Lists

#50

Post by lifeisstillgood »

A little more on subject, and I am totally failing to find a good todo list app. I am not sure what I really want but something like

- can extract todos from my code - can be very very context aware (location, time, am I in code base or out on street or on a phone call?)

To be fair that last one is the list problem - it's an Embodiment of intelligence - a list is a marker for a agent, that jogs my memory at one point in time

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