Lists

Almost all MicroContent clients that have been analysed have the concept of a List. A List is a collection of one or more Items. Such a collection allows a user to group Items together. A user might want to group Items for better retrieval, easy access or filtering of Items. Thus a user might want to group recipes for desserts into a Dessert List. Or a user might want to have a list of Recipes that he liked, so that he can quickly find such recipes. Or several recipes might be grouped for a menu of a dinner.

Lists can have other names as well, such as Bookshelves (Delicious Library), Accounts (pmPost), Workspaces (OmniWeb), Groups (Address Book), Playlists (iTunes), Albums (iPhoto), Subscriptions (NetNewsWire), Weblogs (MarsEdit), etc.

Most Clients manage a single Library with Items. There are however Clients that are Document-based. Such Clients can open multiple Libraries. One could view these multiple libraries as multiple Lists or even multiple Groups. Info.xhead is a Client that is Document-based.

In grouping various Items a grouping logic is followed. In analysing the various Lists found in Clients, we distinguish two grouping principles: location logic and item characteristic logic. These two grouping principles are orthogonal, i.e. they can be combined. Lists are either defined by the user (user-defined) or defined by the Client developer (pre-defined).

The location logic refers to the actual storage place of the grouped Items. The storage place tells the user where the Items are physically located, i.e. on the computer, a connected device, on the local network or a on remote server on Internet.

The item characteristic logic refers to the relation between the Items themselves, which is based on the content of an Item. This could be for instance recipes which are made with a certain ingredient. Or the menu mentioned earlier, which follow a logic only known to the user.