Advanced Shopping List
Target Users:
I have a relatively simple shopping-list App, which I'm planning on slowly making a bit more sophisticated. But in
this long post, Siderea describes all the dimensions that are involved in The One True Shopping List. I suspect that not all of it is possible in the foreseeable future, but it makes a fine checklist of what would be desirable, and it's worth thinking about what features would be helpful in order to support that.
One aspect, which I mention in the comments there, is that, while having the app simply spit out the complete shopping list is hard, it's much more straightforward to build a constraint-solving assistant, that lets you check off aspects of the problem and it shows you the remaining solution space. This might be a very powerful and useful feature, if I can get the abstractions right and make a UI that isn't awful. Note that it's a similar problem, conceptually, to the LARP-casting problem that we addressed manually in A Respectful Calm. What would be involved in building a generic tool for that?
Notes from my Diary
- Set up the new Shopping List Space. Include a new-style _createHere button for adding new Items. Might do that during vacation.
- Need to add a “search and then” function, which displays a search box and then executes some QL with the found item. In principle, I want this to be a Marco Polo field, but one under more control, where I can supply constraints, so I can say something like:
[[_searchAndThen(from = Items._instances) -> ...]]
- Then we’re getting to the “store” function, I think. I want the QL for “search and then” to be “add this Thing to the Shopping List”.
- I suspect both of the above have to be entered as enhancements: they’re too big to do right now.
Open Stories
Completed Stories
