Bins

[srdiamond]

Congratulations on the new version of BrainStorm!

A question about bins. How did you settle or 5 or 6 as the number. Would implementing more bins cause some problem or impose other overhead? Five is arguably the optimal number of categories for general sorting, but I get a sense of claustrophia by from the arbitrary limitation. Seven categories with the option of eight would tailor the maximum to the maxic number seven of short term memory.

btw, I received no notice of the upgrade, but I understand other licensed users did. My e-mail address is srdiamond@gmail.com, if you can check to see if you have it right at your convenience.

[david]

Hi Stephen.

I'm afraid we aren't subtle enough to notice email address changes until we get a bounce message. And, even then, we're not diligent enough to plough through them and try to match them to incoming emails to see if we have a new address.

In case anyone else is reading this: the only way to be sure that an address change gets into the database is to explicitly tell us.

We have your old srdiamond15 on the database. We'll change it to the new address you started using in January 2005.

While I'm asking Marck to do that, I'll ask him if he remembers the reason for 5 new marks, plus the original.

I'd guess that it just seemed a good idea at the time.

[srdiamond]

David,

You know, I did send a change of address a half a year or so ago. You asked Marck to record it and enter my name on the beta list.

I haven't gotten anything back on the bins, so I'll just put it as a suggestion.

The optimal number of available bins is, in my opinion, 7 to 9. I guess the emphasis you put on the workaround suggests that five actually represented some hard limit. If so, you should probably pretty much disregard this.

In case 5 was simply a good number, and you didn't give the matter a lot of thought, I would suggest that five is probably something like the median number of bins one would use. So it isn't grossly inadequate but I think less than optimal. If the number can be increased, and particularly if it doesn't not require allocating substantial resources to the task, I would suggest expanding the number to at least 7 (8 with the workaround). Personally, I think that would be the ideal number of available bins, but some users might prefer a few more still.

[david]

I can find neither request nor reply and I thought we kept every single email. Not sure it's very productive to take it further, but if you'd like to forward the correspondence, it could help me track down whether the email archiving has a glitch.

We exchanged private emails about the bins. If you didn't see my response, perhaps you have me marked as a spammer.

This was my response to you on December 10th:

-----------------------------------------

Dear Stephen

Well it's very unfortunate that you resigned the bswbeta mail list on
30th October 2005...

SRD> Since I'm using the forum to access BrainStorm discussion, I'd
SRD> like to unsubscribe to the e-mail list.

...because the (very small) discussion on bins/buckets started there
on 30th January 2006. And the very first suggestion was for bins 0 to
9.

It seems that I'm the guilty party re: number of bins. I wrote
privately to Marck suggesting how the menu would work using six bins
to illustrate.

> My buckets
> name 1 Ctrl+1
> name 2 Ctrl+1
> name 3 Ctrl+1
> name 4 Ctrl+1
> name 5 Ctrl+1
> name 6 Ctrl+1
> ---------------------
> Edit names...

We didn't do this, but the number of bins stuck. (And the Ctrl numbers
should have read 1 to 6, of course.)

We told the bswbeta folk about the feature on 22nd September 2006.

On 30th September, Nigel Chippindale said he'd hoped for ten:

NC> I had hoped for 10 of them using some sort of Alt-0, Alt-1, etc.
NC> to throw stuff to them. But five would be four better than we have
NC> now, so I won't complain (much, for the moment).

And, of course, he ended up with six which was one more better than
his expectation.

The new functionality was made public in the forum on Jun 13, 2007.

http://www.brainstormsw.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=234

No-one commented.

I have no idea what's involved in expanding the list. Except that it's
taken us an age to get to this point. I have a feeling that we're
'frozen' for now while Marck recovers.

Kind regards

David Tebbutt

----------------------------------------------

Marck and I have spoken about the bin numbers. It's on his list. A couple of patches are higher up. When we get to the bins, we'll restart the debate.