Re: Toggle appointment notification

[Jean Louis]

Software features may influence those human methods that people
implement themselves to better or worse.

Many good useful features can be developed by looking how "others" are
doing. By thinking in advance "how is this feature to impact future
thousands if not hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of
users". 

It is true that I sound general here, that is because I am sorry for
many users who encounter Org mode but end up in the jungle of
procrastination. Emacs Lisp is powerful language and may be used to
integrate it better for users and help in improving collaboration
between people and groups.

I have given many specifics on the other mailing list of Org. I feel
with users who spend their time in learning a tool to become
organized, while there are others who learn not longer than 5 minutes
and already know what is to be done.

This is because their software is logically and practically organized
with useful user interface.

Then I have got quite an impression from reading of Org list that
people are wasting their efforts. When goal is to organize project
execution, or to know what is the agenda then is fine to discuss about
that, with or without Org. Maybe Org can improve by looking how others
are doing. Maybe people can improve their organization by
understanding the ideal situation.

One specific that Org mode lacks is "people" as most important focus
there. It tries to be relational to people but it does not offer
structure of relation. No, org-contacts package cannot replace what I
am thinking about it.

Centralized Emacs based contact management is what Emacs need to have
as foundation. BBDB is not doing good job there. I know it maybe since
20 years. One other user lost people contacts on upgrade of BBDB and I
remember this happened to me with few contacts that I used it back
then.

I would like Emacs to have GDBM built in or other database. The
PostgreSQL dynamic module is coming to GNU ELPA, developers are
working on it and I am using it since its inception. Before I was
using pg module, which stopped working. 

I am using database backed people and contacts management through
Emacs and I am speedy and fast, and hope that we can make some
difference for the future by introducing at least concepts that people
may adopt and integrate into future tools.

It does not matter really how, but "people" as database is first
foundation that Emacs should have, very robust and possibly built
in. Then it is pretty easy to upgrade the foundation with "groups" or
"organizations" or "companies".

We have calendar but we have no people. Hmmm. While tools as such as
interesting as hacks or amusing programs, when making them, one cannot
expect there will be nobody to criticize it. Or that we should not
criticize it.

Unless I live alone on the deserted island using M-x calendar, any
calendar is not fine in computing environment if there are no related
people to it. We do planning with people.

When I say "foundation", I only refer to core design of the structure
of contacts and organizations and not to any integration. If the
structure and core design is well made it can last for future
decades. At least my structure is already for decades for me working
without changes.

That would be blazing quick access to contacts and organizations. It
would be easy to refer to contacts, something like:

(contact-first-name id)
(contact-middle-names id)
(contact-last-name id)
(contact-full-name id)
(contact-country-1 id)
(contact-country-2 id)
(contact-phone id)
(contact-cell id)
(contact-fax id)

When contacts are there, then the Org mode's demand for contact and
relations to contact would be fundamentally solved. Instead of
entering per file few settings, users could simply assign a heading to
specific contact. No writing, just semantic access. Something like
"Joe, Guayana" would inject the hyperlink into Org. Share to contact,
share to assigned contacts, share to groups, send task to group of
people, or single one, share by SMS, initiate a call, do the real
work and real collaboration.

Or maybe I am just alone here who is writing tasks for groups of
people and assigning them, maybe all other people are just writing for
themselves and like to invoke 50-100 key presses to inform the
assigned person of the assigned task. I like 2 key presses. I like
when I have 77 tasks that at one key press I can inform all of
them.

I will send here to this mailing list proposal on how people database
should look like, and then I hope we can discuss that and make one
good foundation for future of Emacs users. From my long year
experience I have also some features that I would maybe make little
bit different.

Then based on people and organizations we could build relations from
other software to make life easier.

Jean