Saturday, January 07, 2006

Random Thoughts

Spousal Relationships:

Father
-- Child
Mother
-- Child

...is one way of showing traditional multiple parent to child relationships in an outline form, marking up the child element to show cloning or aliasing.

I think instead the mother and father should somehow be marked up and combined as they are the elements that are given the special spousal relationship, perhaps in this manner:

[Marriage]: Father, Mother
-- Child

This would fit in with OmniGraffle's group and table markup in outline view. I propose unit/superunit hierarchy in addition to traditional child/parent/superparent hierarchy for threaded or tree/branch view.

Tactile Interface for Electronics

As more and more touch-panel tablets and PDAs and the like come about, the use of a finger should do more than drive a cursor around as a mouse does, there also needs to be a dynamic highlighting effect as well, think of what you do when you take a newspaper and show someone a block of text or picture with your finger.