Roles and Notes

[Uncle Buddy]

In the events table on the person tab, there are two columns, "Roles" and "Notes" which display an ellipsis (...) if content exists for the current person in that column and otherwise are blank. Clicking the ellipsis or a blank field where there is no ellipsis opens role or note dialogs.

Roles in Treebard are for people that are accessory to the event. For example, a wedding event has two main participants but many other roles such as religious official and flower girl. A new role can be input into the dialog. Roles people are stored in the database, same as family members, because you never know who you're gonna wanna research for your next clue. So the roles dialog will be improved to add the "Create New Person" functionality to the roles person field.

Notes for an event are subdivided by subtopic. To display a note, the subtopic is chosen from a dropdown list. Every note has a subtopic, and a subtopic can contain any number of notes. Any given note can be attached to any number of persons, places, sources, etc. so that a note doesn't have to be copied and pasted, it's only typed once.

A modal dialog is one that freezes the app when the dialog opens so you can't do anything in the app except deal with the modal dialog. As shown in the screenshot, Treebard's dialogs are not always modal. You can open several dialogs at once, if it's safe to do so without messing up the data. Other programs overuse modal dialogs. For example I'll click on something because I want to do something, but then there's a field on the dialog that opens up which I can't fill out without looking something up using a different part of the program. So I have to close the dialog to use the app, because the dialog is modal. This is often unnecessary. Modal dialogs should be used as sparingly as possible.

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[Uncle Buddy]

It was time to get the existing notes dialog to accept new input, so the user can create new notes or edit old ones or rename a note. I realized I'd been avoiding this for a good reason: I didn't like the design. What do you do with 500 lines of code you've been avoiding for six months because you don't like how the GUI works? Start over from scratch. The screenshot shows the new version of the notes dialog.

In Treebard, each note is named with a subtitle. If there's only one or two notes attached to an event, this seems like overkill, but the default note subtitle "Note One" can be kept or changed to something equally generic if subtitles aren't needed. My experience is that a subject of deep research needs a lot of notes, but I've had to put a lot of information in one giant note in such cases. Better to break it up by subject, and naming each note lets you do that. The key to it is a table of contents.

Instead of a combobox for that, I decided to use a listbox, but the Tkinter listbox didn't play well with the Tkinter text widget where the user types and reads notes, so I created my own Tkinter listbox from spare parts. The user arrows up and down the list and the corresponding note displays automatically as each subtitle is highlighted. No extra mouse clicks needed for most of the functionalities in this dialog, in accordance with Treebard design policy: extra clicks are bad.

Notes (subtopics) can be renamed. When creating notes they can be positioned in any order desired within the table of contents listbox, and easily shifted up and down the list later. A subdialog can be opened wherein notes can be re-ordered. Notes are public by default but can be made private so they won't be shared or added to a GEDCOM file.

I spent a lot of time designing and redesigning the notes input dialog because it's important to have an easy, convenient way to add data that's too complex, verbose, or tentative to fit in any other category. Keeping research notes keeps the research interesting and manageable so you don't have to remember every facet of every thread or theory that you're hoping to follow up on. The program remembers it for you. There will also be do lists, project maps, contacts, email records, etc.

I still have to add a way to link an existing note to an existing entity (person, place, source, event) but I'm done with notes for now and will come back to it another time.

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