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A Personalized Information Environment Mail Tool

1. Queries should be able to search large message bases and to display summaries of matching messages One should be able to traverse these summaries looking for messages of interest Queries should normally be given by filling out a query form with known information to match against The form should be very similar to the basic mail composition form Queries should return a summary listing of matching messages which can be browsed to locate desired messages There should be a means of saving queries for application at a later time For example one may want to produce archives of messages once a quarter where only the prior quarter s messages are saved A query could be stored to do this where one would simply fill in the quarter desired The forms used for queries should therefore be customizable 3 4 2 Address Lookup Mail addresses and aliases should be easy to lookup and to insert into outgoing messages Given a name one should be able to ask for the person s mail address only or his entire record of information from an address book Chapter 4 PIEmail Design 19 4 PIEmail Design This chapter presents a class structured view of PIEmail examining in turn its main constructs and personalization facilities PIEmail s approach is to provide a strong extensible information management base tailored to the messaging domain which may be highly personalized to improve its utility to individual and organizational users Two interfaces are being
2. You can see that button and mail handling are just a few of the things for which the Smart Keys are useful They are designed to offer a convenient means of browsing throughout an envi ronment without a need to remember any complicated modifier keys to press in conjunction with the mouse keys Instead you point at the entity you want to operate upon and natural operations are performed If you want to customize what happens when an entity is selected you can define new implicit button types that override the default Smart Key behaviors Chapter 5 Hyperbole 41 5 5 2 Operating Menus Hyperbole menus provide access to its user level commands Only one key binding is used for the top level menu but menu items may be selected from either the keyboard or via mouse clicks When used with the keyboard they provide rapid command access similar to regular key bindings The Buttons menu is invoked from the PIEmail Construct menu from a key by default C h h or via a Smart Key press in a random context The menu will appear in the minibuffer and should look about like so Hypb gt Act ButFile Doc EBut GBut Hist IBut Msg Rolo Types All button items are selected via the first character of their names letter case does not matter or via a press of the Smart Key at the end of an item name indicates that it brings up a sub menu You can browse around the menus by hitting C t to return to the top menu or q when you want to quit inste
3. 48 predicate referent Smart Key PTEmail Technical Report A boolean nil false non nil true Lisp expression typically evaluated as part of a conditional expression See link A context sensitive key used within Hyperbole and beyond Actually there are two Smart Keys a primary and a secondary Smart Key sometimes referred to as the Smart Key and Smart Meta Key respectively The primary Smart Key typically bound to the middle mouse key activates Hyperbole buttons and scrolls the buffer forward a screenful when pressed at the end of a line The secondary Smart Key typically bound to the right mouse key explains what a Hyperbole button does or scrolls the buffer backward a screenful when pressed at the end of a line To see what a Smart Key will do within a particular context depress and hold the key at the point desired and depress the other Smart Key A buffer containing a description of its contextual function will then be displayed You may release the two keys in any order after you have them both depressed A press of the secondary Smart Key in an unsupported context displays a summary of Smart Key functions in each context as does the Doc SmartKy menu item source buffer file The buffer or file within which a Hyperbole button is embedded system encapsulation view view spec Use of Hyperbole to provide an improved or simply consistent user interface to another system Typically implicit button types are
4. Filters apply a predicate over a set of messages and return either the ones matching the predicate or the ones that failed to match by inverting the predicate Built in filters include subject attribute any message attribute such as priority addressee sender or receiver all to restore all the messages from the folder and date range filtering Other filters are easy to write A personalized example might be to filter out all messages in a folder except those from local co workers This would provide the local perspective on the topic so that it could be compared to external inputs poa 10 PIEmail Technical Report The Filters menu offers the these commands Filters Menu Descriptions Apply Applies a filter to current view Create Creates a new filter Delete Deletes a filter Edit Edits a filter specification Rename Names or renames a filter Filtering may also be done manually by individually marking messages from a message summary buffer and then hiding either the marked or unmarked messages Filtering and sorting a folder produces an ordered subset of the messages in the folder PIEmail therefore displays two message numbers for filtered or re ordered messages One is the absolute number of the message indicating its physical order and another is a relative number giving its position in the ordered set Many common PIEmail message commands may be applied to message sets produced by filters and sorters or to entire
5. Sorters order messages within a set according to desired attributes Views utilize forms filters and sorters to produce perspectives on entities such as folders and messages Collection views are especially common since they summarize related entities helping one to take in the relationships that exist The results of queries are always displayed as collection views Filters may also be applied independently of view selection so that one can affect the collection being viewed without altering its display format Forms views filters and sorters may all be named like other PIEmail personalization facilities to afford quick application over a set of informational entities For example apply the messages from this month view to all all mail that comes to my standard mail address This would produce a folder summary view reporting only those messages that match the filter applied by the view namely those received during the current month As you might expect there are pm form pm view pm filter and pm sorter classes PIEmail also provides more specialized types of the form and view classes to target the special needs of particular mail entities Pm msgview and pm summform are two examples 4 1 4 Priorities Message priorities are assigned by recipients or their rule sets to provide an easy means to rank or filter messages for processing Priorities are just like other multi valued message attributes except that special operators are provid
6. public or limited to a specific group Message bases are dealt with in a bulletin board fashion where people can create topic based groups and then post to them allowing readers to inspect them at their leisure Presently PIEmail has no specific support for shared message bases but as mentioned in the chapter on PIEs we foresee a later merging of mail and news handling under such as framework Chapter 7 Prior Work 59 AMS active messages contain a programmatic component that can direct an interaction with a user through dialog boxes and other means A sample interaction could have a user fill out a multiple choice survey and then mail it back to the sender FLAMES Filtering Language for the Andrew MEssage System is a Lisp like language used within AMS to automate mail handling tasks just like our rules concept but with a richer set of standard operators geared towards mail handling Borenstein and Thyberg the authors of BoTh91 go to great lengths to show that user interfaces can be made that deal well with both novices and experts along the lines of our multi modal interface requirements They argue that ease of use can be treated independently from program complexity that in fact more complex programs can be easier to use than simpler ones Our experience and prototyping work over the last several years has agreed with this axiom The discussion of the Advisor system built upon AMS highlights the importance of automatic message cla
7. to which to save messages Message stores Queries allow for structured pattern matches across any number of folders retrieves from COMPOSITION sends Forms may be cregted fo meet various messaging tasks and then selected from a menu and used in a fill in the blank fashion during mail composition gets address from Traditional Mail Reader Concept BROWSING reads from Reader reads mail from a single local mailbox Message categorization support is minimal as are automation facilities COMPOSITION sends Message composition uses a fixed form and often only a weak editor holds Message Chapter 2 PIEmail Operation 7 The main functional areas of PIEmail are broken out in the diagram browsing management retrieval and composition Traditional systems offer fixed message browsing and message subject summary views PIEmail allows user configuration of message browsing and summary views thereby permitting more flexible perspectives on message bases Traditional systems offer little mail management support so users tend to accumulate large in boxes often with hundreds of unorganized messages PIEmail uses the folder as the central message organization construct Priorities and other message attributes also help in message organization A folder list view further supports folder level management Traditional systems also lack message retrieval support PIEmail provides form based queries for searching
8. Address An electronic mail address PIEmail supports Internet domain based addressing stan dards It also offers task based personally generated addresses Attribute A value based field attached to a PIEmail entity Most commonly attributes are asso ciated with individual messages Many attributes are boolean valued true or false Body The content portion of a message The header is the other portion MIME compliant message bodies may further be split into typed components Button A Hyperbole button Buttons may be embedded within PIEmail messages rolodex entries and within textual files A button is activated by pressing a key while pointing at the button label Buttons often link to local or wide area information sources but may perform any rule type action Command A user visible PIEmail operation Conversation A series of messages that reference one another Entity PIE informational artifacts PIEmail entities include messages rolodex entries and folders Filter A preset mechanism for removing messages from a set See also Query Folder A persistent message store used to store messages by category Form A field oriented screen specification for data entry or display Header The structured envelope part of a message at its beginning Hyperbole An associative button based information manager integrated with PIEmail Mailbox A store to which mail transfer agents deposit mail PIEmail reads mail from mailboxes and stores it in
9. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1983 pp 98 102 KaLoCaLa92 S Kaplan C Love A Carroll D LaLiberte Epoch GNU Emacs for the X Windowing System Release 4 0 University of Illinois Urbana IL March 1992 LaMa91 K Lai and T W Malone Object Lens Letting End Users Create Cooperative Work Applications Proceedings of the CHI 91 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Com puting Systems 1991 pp 425 426 Mackay88 W E Mackay More than Just a Communication System Diversity in the Use of Elec tronic Mail Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 1988 pp 344 353 MaGrLa87 T W Malone K R Grant K Y Lai R Rao and D R Rosenblitt Semistructured messages are surprisingly useful for computer supported coordination ACM Transac tions on Office Information Systems 1987 5 2 pp 115 131 MaMaCr89 W E Mackay T W Malone K Crowston R Rao D Rosenblitt and S K Card How Do Experienced Information Lens Users Use Rules Proceedings of the ACM CHI 89 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1989 pp 211 216 Perlman91 G Perlman The HCI Bibliography Project ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 23 3 1991 pp 15 20 RoEvBo87 J Rosenberg C Everhart and N Borenstein An Overview of the Andrew Message System SIGCOMM 87 Workshop Stowe VT August 1987 RuBIPrEdLo91 J Rumbaugh M Blaha W Premerlani F Eddy and W Lorensen Object Orie
10. D C Engelbart Authorship Provisions in Augment Proceedings of the 1984 COMP CON Conference COMPCON 84 Digest February 27 March 1 1984 San Francisco CA IEEE Computer Society Press Spring 1984 pp 465 472 OAD 2250 Engelbart84b D C Engelbart Collaboration Support Provisions in Augment Proceedings of the AFIPS Office Automation Conference OAC 84 Digest Los Angeles CA February 1984 pp 51 58 OAD 2221 68 PIEmail Technical Report Hamlyn92 S Hamlyn NeXTStep PIEmail Proposal Brown University Providence RI 1992 unpublished HeCa86 D A Henderson Jr and S K Card Rooms The Use of Multiple Virtual Workspaces to Reduce Space Contention in a Window Based Graphical User Interface ACM Trans actions on Graphics 5 3 1986 pp 211 243 Horton83 M Horton Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages Internet Request for Comments Number 850 RFC 850 USENET Project June 1983 Available from anonymous ftp nisc sri com rfc rfc850 txt HP89 HP NewWave Issue Hewlett Packard Journal August 1989 JeRo87 R Jeffries and J Rosenberg Comparing a Form Based and a Language Based User Interface for Instructing a Mail Program Proceedings of the ACM CHI GI 87 Con ference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and Graphics Interface 1987 pp 261 266 KaMaSo83 T Kaczmarek W Mark and N Sondheimer The Consul CUE Interface An Inte grated Interactive Environment Proceedings of the ACM CHI 83
11. Hyperbole menu item This information does not appear in that file but is stored separately in a terse format loc gt DEMO lt factorial gt Evaluates a Lisp expression LISP EXPR actype eval elisp args message Factorial of 5 d 5 4 3 2 creator rsw cs brown edu create time Nov 25 05 52 22 EDT 1991 modifier rsw mod time Nov 25 05 54 00 EDT 1991 factorial Evaluates a Lisp expression LISP EXPR actype eval elisp args message Factorial of 5 4d 5 4 3 2 creator rswOcs brown edu create time Nov 25 05 52 22 EDT 1991 modifier rsy mod time Nov 25 05 54 00 EDT 1991 lt Info directory list gt Evaluates a Lisp expression LISP EXPR actype eval elisp args describe variable Info directory list creator rsw0cs brown edu create time Nov 25 23 46 16 EDT 1991 modifier rsy mod time Dec 30 03 17 52 EDT 1991 lt Info directory gt Evaluates a Lisp expression LISP EXPR actype eval elisp args message Info directory 4s Info directory creator rswOcs brown edu create time Nov 25 23 46 54 EDT 1991 keyboard macros Displays an Info NODE in another window actype link to Info node args emacs Keyboard Macros creator rsw cs brown edu create time Nov 25 21 08 12 EDT 1991 lt glossary gt Displays an Info NODE in another window Appendix C Hyperbole Demonstration 79 actype link to Info node args hypb inf
12. Rules may use any header or body information to determine where to file a message and what priority to give it Rule sets are built up in a recursive manner in which the output of the rules over a set of messages is used to refine that same rule logic Although this process never ends since one s interests and work tasks never wholly stop changing we find that it converges quite quickly for any period of time Within the course of a few days of usage one can quickly build up quite sophisticated classification patterns which dramatically improve upon any classification that could be done manually Presently rules must be specified programmatically using a simple Lisp syntax like if pm hdr string subject PIE pm msg file to pie which says to file messages containing the term PIE in their Subject header fields to the pie folder The rule language must be sufficiently flexible to permit growth in the system facilities and to allow succinct expression of common message handling policies and individual rules We do not concern ourselves with the security of this rule language since we assume that each user or respon sible administrator has sole responsibility for each rule set and that any rule based actions encoded in incoming messages may be inspected before activation that is they are never automatically activated We expect to provide a form based means of specifying rules The form would name the rule provide its eval
13. Rules are the prime means of personalized automation within PIEmail Rules specify conditional predicates that determine when they should be tested and in what contexts they should activate Activation of a rule causes the evaluation of its action components Rules have access to all folders and to entire messages Rules may be applied to individual messages or message collections Rules can be used to analyze both incoming and outgoing messages in order to perform extensive sets of personalized actions Possible actions include categorizing messages by topic and priority for reading forwarding messages to local newsgroups or other interested parties and linking messages into public archives as part of an organizational knowledge base Rules should also simplify the creation of mail servers which deliver information automatically Rules may be triggered when PIEmail is started when new mail is read when folders are opened or closed when messages are archived or sent and when PIEmail is quit Analysis of outgoing messages can be used not only to determine where to log such messages but also to influence the handling of responses For example one may want all responses filed into a single folder in which case an appropriate task address can be generated and placed into the Reply to field of the outgoing message directing all replies to a personalized location The most common use of rules is to automate the folders into which messages are filed
14. a button label is irrelevant to Hyperbole so button labels may wrap across several lines without causing a problem See Section 5 3 6 Label Keys page 34 When Hyperbole is run under Epoch it can automatically highlight any explicit buttons in a buffer and make them flash when selected Hyperbole stores the button data that gives an explicit button its behavior separately from the button label in a file named hypb within the same directory as the file in which the button is created Button data is comprised of individual button attribute values A user never sees this data in its raw form but may see a formatted version by asking for help on a button Explicit buttons may be freely moved about within the buffer in which they are created No present support exists for moving buttons between buffers but this is a high priority item for development A single button may also appear multiple times within the same buffer Explicit buttons are associated with action types which determine the actions they perform Link action types connect buttons to particular types of referents Activation of such buttons then displays the referents Hyperbole does not manage referent data this is left to the applications that generate the data This means that Hyperbole provides in place linking and does not require reformatting of data to integrate it within a Hyperbole framework 5 3 2 Action Types and Actions Action types provide action procedures
15. an operation will do before applying the operation Thus one can get help on buttons and menu items before activating them by using the secondary Smart Key When you use a mouse and you want to find out what either of the Smart Keys does within a context depress the one you want to check on and hold it down then press the other and release as you please A help buffer will pop up explaining the actions that will be performed in that context if any A press of the primary Smart Key at the end of that help buffer will restore your display to its configuration prior to invoking help You can also get a complete listing of what the Smart Keys do in different contexts by pressing the secondary Smart Key within a context that has no special Smart Key function e g the middle of a paragraph The following table is an example of what you will be shown Much of the browsing power of Hyperbole comes from use of the Smart Keys so it is worth spending some time examining the table It may appear daunting at first but as you practice and notice that the Smart Keys do just a few custom things per editor mode you will find it easy to just point and click and let Hyperbole do the rest 40 Hyperbole On a menu item On an explicit button Reading argument ist press at an arg value 2nd press at an arg value In minibuffer 0n an implicit button Wrolo Match Buffer Screen Control Line end not end of buffer End of Any Help buffer Special Modes C Mod
16. deal with all correspondence regarding this task separately so he creates a task address that assigns a corresponding mail box for Lars exec conf and informs potential conference attendees that all such correspondence should be addressed there From that point on he selects that address as the reply to location whenever he mails to the group of executives and he establishes a rule to catch errantly addressed mail to his standard mail address and to refile it appropriately After the conference when the task is no longer needed he can remove the task address and the rule that redirects mail there He can leave the task mail around so that he has access to the archive of conference messages or he can delete it together with the other task artifacts Finally there is Megan who often must survey people on different topics She uses a single program to extract survey responses and summarize resulting statistics It would be useful for the system to recognize a survey message as such and to direct responses so that the response analysis program is run on each one as it arrives The surveyor may then check the running tallies any time throughout the survey period She can direct all survey responses to a task to simplify this automatic processing See Appendix D Sendmail Tasks page 81 if you use Sendmail as your mail transfer agent for information on how to configure it for task address support p 26 PIEmail Technical Report 4 7 2 Rules
17. defined to recognize and activate button type constructs managed by the other system A perspective on some information A view can affect the extent of the information displayed its format modes used to operate on it its display location and so forth A terse and to the uninitiated cryptic string that specifies a particular view of a link referent or some other information Chapter 6 Personalized Information Environments PIEs 49 6 Personalized Information Environments PIEs 6 1 Overview it is useful to talk about providing an individual with a private intellectual work space the intellectual workshop in which one does his collaborative bit within his working environment one needs work spaces tools to suit a myriad of tasks places to store working materials aids to hold them for examination and shaping and they all should be easy to reach quick to adjust to the task easy to keep track of etc Interactive computer aids will have very significant effects here Engelbart70 PIEmail and Hyperbole have been designed with a larger picture in mind that of an overall Personalized Information Environment PIEs are still very much an evolving concept so no design yet exists This whole chapter may be thought of as the future research directions section so common in papers today We use it to describe a basic PIE model together with a standard set of components that we believe PIEs should have As more of a PIE is developed p
18. folders which classify and add attributes to it Mail User Agent MUA An interactive program used to read and send electronic mail messages Neither MUA nor MTA should be confused with the more technical use of the term agent to mean an autonomous process that carries out a plan or strategy on behalf of a user Mail Transfer Agent MTA Message MIME PIE Priority Query RFC 822 A non interactive program that transfers mail from one network node to another along a route An piece of electronic mail It consists of a header and a body Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions An evolving Internet standard for transfer and encoding of multi media mail PIEmail supports some MIME features with an eye towards broader MIME compliance in the future Personalized Information Environment An integrated tool based approach to maxi mizing electronic information handling productivity in a technical realm PIEmail and Hyperbole are prototypical pieces of a PIE An urgency level assigned to a PIEmail entity Priorities may be given as names or numbers Lower number represent higher priorities with 1 being the highest A request to retrieve messages satisfying specified criteria This specifies the base level standard electronic mail format used on the Internet See also MIME l 72 PIEmail Technical Report Rolodex An addressee and contact management facility integrated with PIEmail Rule A predicate action pair used under PIEmail to pr
19. it manages summaries of the messages within folders Pm fdr may be thought of as a specialization of the pm set class which manages ordered sets of messages The pm fdr class is generic in the sense that its operations do not rely on the internal formats of the folders upon which it operates Each folder s type is determined when the folder is opened by examining its data format This allows PIEmail to dispatch to folder type specific operations whenever necessary permitting it to read folders in a variety of formats such as UNIX BSD mail Babyl and MH folders Thus support for a new folder type can be added basically by providing the same interface that the pm baby1 class does Pm fdr will utilize it without any modification In object oriented parlance we say that pm fdr is a client of pm fdr type which has subclasses of pm babyl and pm unix The organization of PIEmail data is a descending hierarchy of user folder subfolders and message This hierarchy translates directly to a directory and file based organization for PIEmail information A subfolder s name is prefixed with the name of its parent folder and a character For example piemail design could hold messages on this design work with the parent folder piemail holding more general PIEmail related messages Folder options include whether a summary should be produced whenever the folder is opened whether the summary is recomputed after each folder change and whether messages mark
20. messages one simply selects a folder from the folder list Initially there is only one folder A user or his automated mail filing rules may create others Selection of a folder opens the folder and displays the first unseen message or the last seen message if all messages have been viewed before All folder and message commands may be applied from this view One can move to a previous or next message or jump to a message by number One can also delete undelete or edit messages A message may be copied from one folder to another or printed Each folder can have any number of mailboxes attached which will be read whenever the folder is opened Reader Menu PIEmail Technical Report mw me mw amara Help Prev Screen Next A11 Msgs First Msg To Msg End Del Msg To Prev Expunge And Save Msgs Reply To Sender Send Mail Append Msg To Folder Kill Msg Attribute Quit Reading Mail Print Msg Next Msg Prev All Msgs Last Msg To Msg Begin Undel Prev Msg Edit Msg Reply To Everybody Continue Send Mail Read ther Folder Filter By Attribute lt Quit Menus gt Next Screen Prev Msg Summary 0f Msg Hdrs Jump To Msg Num Del Msg To Next Expunge Deleted Msgs Get New Mail Forward Msg To Addr Append Msg To Unix Mail Add Msg Attribute Toggle Show Short Msg Hdr lt Top Menu gt lt Last Menu gt Items that end with invoke submenus Items may be selected with the mouse or from the keyb
21. of text to use for your button label invoke the button create command from the menu choose an action type which begins with link to and then use the direct selection techniques mentioned in Section 5 5 3 Entering Arguments page 41 to select the link referent This becomes quite rapid after a few tries so that one can quickly create links from almost anywhere to anywhere else 5 5 4 2 Renaming Once an explicit button has been created its label text must be treated specially Any inter word spacing within the label may be freely changed as may happen when a paragraph is refilled But a special command must be invoked to rename it The rename command operates in two different ways If point is within a button label when it is invoked it will tell you to edit the button label and then invoke the rename command again The second invocation will actually rename the button If instead the command is originally invoked outside of any explicit button it will prompt for the button label to replace and the label to replace it with and then will perform the rename Chapter 5 Hyperbole 43 The rename command may be invoked from the Hyperbole menu via Ebut Rename A faster method is to use a key bound to the hui ebut rename command Your site installation may include such a key C h w hui ebut rename RTN should show you any key it is on 5 5 4 3 Deletion Ebut Delete works similarly to the Rename command but deletes the selected button The b
22. pw 1 05 92 Urgent Review of your PIEmail thesis information stock market 39 mkt anal 2 02 92 Low Apple provides agent based electronic mail information stock market 46 mkt anal 2 05 92 Low Information Lens intelligent mail processor ewww ew we pm rm zm The messages that match the query are called hits Hits are identified in summary form by location and message number Any hit summary line may then be selected for display One may also walk through the hits sequentially essentially treating the items as a folder summary The results may also be sorted by date or priority and so forth either by filling in the Sort By field as part of the query or interactively in the same fashion as for folder summaries 2 8 Rolodex Use A full menu based rolodex that manages e mail addresses and contact information is integrated with PIEmail It supports the storage of hierarchical records such as Company 1 800 555 5555 Manager John lt manager company com gt 1 212 555 8920 Underling Roy lt underling company com gt 1 212 555 8923 Any sort of contact information can be placed here since records are free form and may be any number of lines Retrieval of any record retrieves its entire subtree Thus searching for Manager turns up all of his underling
23. that specify button behavior The use of action types provides a convenient way of specifying button behavior without the need to know how to program New forms of explicit buttons may be created simply by adding new action types to a Hyperbole environment The arguments needed by an action type are prompted for at button creation time When a button is activated the stored arguments are fed to the action type s action body to achieve the desired result Hyperbole handles all of this transparently Standard action types are annot bib Follows internal ref KEY within an annotated bibliography delimiters eval elisp Evaluates a Lisp expression LISP EXPR exec kbd macro Executes KBD MACRO REPEAT COUNT times exec shell cmd Executes a SHELL CMD string asynchronously hyp source Displays a buffer or file from a line beginning with hbut source prefix kbd key Executes the function binding for KEY SEQUENCE delimited by link to Info node Displays an Info NODE in another window Chapter 5 Hyperbole 33 link to buffer tmp Displays a BUFFER in another window link to directory Displays a DIRECTORY in Dired mode in another window link to ebut Performs action given by another button specified by KEY and KEY FILE link to file Displays a PATH in another window scrolled to optional POINT link to file line Displays a PATH in another window scrolled to LINE NUM link to mail Displays mail msg with MAIL MSG ID from MAIL FILE in o
24. their referents should be displayed A concise cryptic to the uninitiated notation was devised to allow quick specification and alteration of views Views and NLS s hierarchical structure made outline processing natural permitting one to collapse and expand nodes and to operate on them in groups as when one wants to move two sections from one chapter to another A window system was produced to support multiple views and inter file comparison and linking on screen The mouse was invented and joined with a 5 key chord keyboard in addition to the regular keyboard to provide rapid direct selection and command invocation using a two handed interface A verb noun action target command grammar e g delete word was developed and applied consistently throughout the core NLS environment and the many subsystems that grew around it 58 PIEmail Technical Report The user interface was multi modal and offered deep personalization features Nodes could be operated upon via direct selection by relative or absolute addressing and by user created macros All events such as key or mouse button presses were mapped to commands through customizable grammar files specific to each NLS subsystem If one tailored the command grammars to one s own needs then all of the applications that utilized the grammar were immediately tailored also This is similar to our notion of a semantic operation mentioned in the previous chapter but differs from the application spec
25. thought into how we can keep performance degradation down as message set sizes grow One idea is to store message headers in a database with multiple indices to speed the most common queries e g from to time based and subject lookups Each record would have a pointer to its message body which usually would take significantly longer to retrieve than the header Chapter 5 Hyperbole 29 5 Hyperbole 5 1 PIEmail Integration Present day mail systems include machine readable references within mail message headers For example In Reply To Earl Johnson s message of Tue 7 Apr 92 07 12 44 0400 lt 9204071112 AA02966 delay cs brown edu gt References lt 9204091737 AA239730flanger cs brown edu gt But there is no reason to limit the placement of references to mail headers nor the references themselves to machine readable forms that point only to other mail messages PIEmail supports two new forms of references that permit easy inclusion of hypertextual ref erences in e mail through its integration with our personalized information manager Hyperbole Such references may appear within any textual mail header or message body The references them selves are human readable with the machine readable reference data hidden from view The first type is an explicit reference whose label and referent are specified by the message sender during message creation The second type is an implicit reference which is recognized according to context
26. we omitted the attributes and methods to emphasize just the inter class relationships In the Hyperbole design diagram we included them in the button classes to show a bit more detail of how these classes work Relations between classes are shown as lines connecting one class to another The role that one class plays with regard to another may be included as a label near its relation end point The arity of the relation is shown through the relation s end points A black circle means zero or more a white circle means zero or one and no circle means one So a line with no endpoints indicates a one to one relationship Arrowheads are used just to indicate role directionality more clearly Diamonds represent an aggregation in which the diamond is attached to an aggregate class whose objects are comprised in part from objects of the class at the other end of the relation Class inheritance is shown via a relation with a triangle in the middle of it The triangle points toward the parent class and is connected to all of the subclasses Comments are included where thought to be helpful within the open space of the diagrams That is the entirety of the diagrammatic notation used Anyone familiar with object oriented concepts should have an easy time with it RuBIPrEdLo91 is a good reference for anyone who is not 74 PIEmail Technical Report Appendix C Hyperbole Demonstration 75 Appendix C Hyperbole Demonstration This is the text of the
27. BROWN UNIVERSITY Department of Computer Science Master s Thesis CS 92 M13 PIEmail A Personalized Information Environment Mail Tool by Bob Weiner PIEmail A Personalized Information Environment Mail Tool Bob Weiner Department of Computer Science Brown University Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in the Department of Computer Science at Brown University May 10 1992 Copyright c 1991 1992 Bob Weiner The author s work on this project has been sponsored by Motorola Inc under the Distinguished Student Employee program Permission to use and redistribute this document in unmodified form for any purpose is hereby granted without fee Any distribution requires that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies and that neither the name of Brown University nor the author s name be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the document without specific written prior permission Any trademarks referenced herein are trademarks of their respective holders This research project by Bob Weiner is accepted in its present form by the Department of Computer Science at Brown University in parital fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science Professor Peter PE Advisor Loy A8 I0 Date Abstract 1 Abstract PIEmail is one of a new generation of electronic mail e mail handling tools that inte
28. EIU EE ERE RE EE 24 4 7 1 Task based Messaging esee 24 470 2 RUNES ii eee es ete ex intem somite waite lolas 26 ATO We CT 27 ATA Priorities a rea Rack eor x oca te oso doe 27 A E EE 28 4 8 Performante cese a de ERREUR e 28 b Hyperbole ios ada 29 Bal PLE MAL negra assi ii A 29 5 2 Hyperbole Concept 2 52 1o pA A EE 29 5 3 Button ConceptS ooooooonooonccrnnrronoororoo ern nn 31 5 3 1 Explicit Buttons eror eh XR VR tee Re eg 32 5 3 2 Action Types and Actions 32 5 3 3 Global Buttons ie ep ri I eR Er hb 33 5 3 4 Implicit Buttons and Type 33 5 3 5 Button Label Keys eese 34 5 3 6 Operational and Storage Formats eee eee 34 5 3 7 Programmatic Button Creatuon 0 cece eee eee 35 5 4 Button and Type Drecedences cscs cece e cece cee e eens 35 5 5 Using Eenegkeet re Ee Ee 37 TS IN A A re e eet 38 5 5 2 Operating Men s cioo noe nord rd RAD cR 41 5 5 8 Entering Argument 22 ee ENEE NEE 4 Ua odie e 41 5 5 4 Working with Explicit Buttons 42 5 54 1 A EE NAME AUPCEN NADA 42 5 5 4 2 Renaming eer eres perveni EEN 42 5 5453 Deletion 4e dao REN e rer Rr EE RR 43 5 5 4 4 Modification estesa ax ex wr eek th mee 43 5 5 4 5 Lociones 43 5 5 4 6 Button Res 43 5 5 4 7 Buttons in Maill ce eee eee ees 44 5 5 4 8 Buttons in News EEN EE ENEE 45 5 6 Hyperbole Glossary id A NEEN ENEE 45 6 Personalized Information Environments PIEs 49 Gal SUI e
29. Information Visualizer An Information Workspace Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1991 pp 181 188 CaSh91 R Carr and D Shafer The Power of PenPoint Addison Wesley Reading MA 1991 Crocker82 D H Crocker Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages In ternet Request for Comments Number 822 RFC 822 Department of Electrical Engineering University of Delaware August 13 1982 Available from anony mous ftp nisc sri com rfc rfc822 txt DoOr85 J Donahue and W Orr Walnut Storing Electronic Mail in a Database Xerox Palo Alto Research Centers Technical Report CSL 85 9 November 1985 EnEn68 D C Engelbart and W English A research center for augmenting human intellect Proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference 33 1 AFIPS Press Montvale NJ 1968 pp 395 410 Engelbart70 D C Engelbart Intellectual Implications of Multi Access Ccmputer Networks Pro ceedings of the Interdisciplinary Conference on Multi Access Computer Networks Austin Tx April 1970 AUGMENT 5255 Engelbart82 D C Engelbart Toward High Performance Knowledge Workers Proceedings of the AFIPS Office Automation Conference OAC 82 Digest San Francisco CA April 5 7 1982 pp 279 290 AUGMENT 81010 Also published in I Greif editor Computer Supported Cooperative Work A Book of Readings Morgan Kaufmann Publishers San Mateio CA 1988 pp 67 78 Engelbart84a
30. Its operation would be very similar to PIEmail which can read news articles but does not offer a fully general news reader A good design could merge the operation of the Mail and News Tools and simply dispatch appropriately whenever a mail folder or newsgroup is opened and browsed Chapter 7 Prior Work 57 7 Prior Work There is way too large a body of work on electronic mail and information mangement systems for us to examine or even to cite Instead we look at a cross section of prior efforts that relate well to our work and leave the reader to explore publications on these projects if a broader view and more references in these areas are desired We first examine Doug Engelbart s augmentation research because it relates well to our overall PIE ideas Then we go on to more specific work germaine to PIEmail systems the Andrew Message System Information Lens Walnut and Tapestry Lastly we point the reader to a few references that support some of our design decisions 7 1 Engelbart and Augmentation Doug Engelbart s multi decade research has demonstrated the effectiveness of integrated infor mation environments hypertext links multimedia mail and personal workstyle support Engel bart84a Engelbart84b EnEn68 l Engelbart was initially motivated to consider how to deal with the burgeoning flow and manage ment of information that society was producing He settled on the term augmentation to describe his work in seeking out both proc
31. RT pL TT 49 6 2 Why Start with E mail ooooooooomccrconcorancanacacaonos 50 6 3 Personalization Needso 4s sis ve vea xve Dus Les EIE QA used ER dE 50 p d E User SRS a um oad ono EEE EEE Eas 51 6 3 2 Organizational Conventions cece eee eee esee 51 6 3 3 Growth Pais o tense awed 52 6 4 Managers and Tool a 53 GAAL E EE 94 6 4 4 1 Agent Manager 54 6 4 4 2 Context Manager 54 6 4 4 3 Database Manager 54 6 4 4 4 Evaluation Manager eese eene 55 6 4 4 5 Event Manager EEN 55 6 4 4 6 Hypertext Manager 55 6 4 4 7 Presentation Manager 55 6 4 4 8 Program Manager eos erre ee nnn 55 6 4 4 9 Rolodex Manager 55 6 4 4 10 Schedule Manager 56 6 4 4 11 Window Manager 56 6 4 5 Tools uo eI hee ea a iere e ER 56 6 4 5 1 Calendar Tool bo ea 56 6 4 52 Image Tooli 6 beue xL OUI Fea ey wos RING 56 6 4 5 3 Mall Toles oae eati e ES Qr re ee 56 6 4 54 News Tool cies exu eher ada rne rne es 56 Prior Works id E REY 57 7 1 Engelbart and Augmentaton coo 57 7 2 Andrew Message System esee eee 58 T Inf rma tion Lens 655 vans cies dex vesae A da dade e VR e ean 59 TUE PARC MOI ood woo ee soe EDI utet hero Sd qu ne PLIC PU MUERE 60 1 5 Miscellaneous o doro tee bte EET e 60 Conclusion owe su vence rt audi dud 63 Acknowledementz 0c eee eee eee e ee eeee 65 EE 67 Appendix A Glossary cs 71 Appendix B Class Diagram Notation 73 Appendix C Hyperbole D
32. When creating file links if the file you are linking to is loaded in a buffer you are prompted as to 76 PIEmail Technical Report whether you want the link to jump to the present point in that buffer If so the link will always jump there so position point within the referent file to take advantage of this feature Note how a separate window is used when you activate file link buttons Most basic Hyperbole action types display their results in this manner You can make a button an alias for another by using the link to ebut action type This lt factorial alias gt button does whatever the earlier lt factorial gt button does The link to mail action type allows you to reference mail messages that you have stored away We can t demonstrate it here since we don t have the mail messages that you do Hyperbole buttons may also be embedded within mail messages Even buttons copied into mail replies can work Emile said gt gt Hyperbole is better than home baked bread but not as filling gt The following sample button displays a message lt as long as you gt click within its first line gt C 4 Implicit Button Samples C 4 1 Implicit Path Links Any doubly quoted pathname acts as an implicit button that displays the referenced path These are pathname implicit buttons For example activate README If you use the Andrew File System or the ange ftp add on to GNU Emacs such remote path names will work as well The lates
33. a list and viewing the messages inside A message summary view may also be used to rapidly scan and process the messages in each folder To further simplify the viewing of folder contents messages may be sorted on the fields in their headers or any attributes they have They may also be filtered to provide a view of a subset of the messages A conversation view may be used to follow the flow of dialogue across messages in a folder We may at a later time add tickler reminders that prompt you to follow up on conversations by mailing a specified message from the conversation to you on a given date Queries may be made over a set of unopened folders to retrieve messages that match particular criteria A rolodex helps manage mail addresses so that when composing mail addresses are always at hand PIEmail s integration with the Hyperbole associative information manager supports easy inclusion of hyperlinks in messages through the use of hyper buttons that may be mailed across local and wide area networks see Chapter 5 Hyperbole page 29 PIEmail also utilizes Hyperbole s Smart Key context sensitive mouse handling support to provide direct selection of entities within PIEmail views These facilities help to significantly reduce the problem of mail overload that many people experience today when mail from sources all around the world on a myriad of topics possibly over a number of days flows into the one and only mail box that they have been assigne
34. ad of selecting an item The above menu items can be summarized as follows Act Perform the action associated with any button at point ButFile Display a local or global file of buttons providing easy access The HYPB file in the current directory for a local button file and hyperb HYPB for your global file These are good places to start your button creation testing See Section 5 5 4 6 Button Files page 43 EBut All explicit button commands Doc Hyperbole documentation quick access GBut All global button commands Global buttons are accessed by name rather than by direct selection Hist Jumps back to last position in button traversal history IBut All implicit button commands Msg Hyperbole specific mail and news messaging support commands This is used to send mail to the Hyperbole discussion list or to add modify a personal entry on a Hyperbole mail list l Rolo Hierarchical multi file rolodex lookup and edit commands See Section 2 8 Rolodex Use page 12 Types Documentation on Hyperbole types 5 5 3 Entering Arguments Many Hyperbole commands prompt you for arguments The standard Hyperbole user interface has an extensive core of argument types that it recognizes Whenever Hyperbole is prompting you for an argument it knows the type that it needs and provides some error checking to help you get it right More importantly it allows you to click within an entity that you want to use as an argume
35. ail task addresses A standard PIEmail rule processes such messages and sends a response listing Brent s available addresses tailored specifically to the sender Brent s address configuration file might look like this Task Comment Addresses to which task is accessible Brent surveyor 9am to Spm Acme Surveying acme com Brent fireman 8pm to iipm Akers County Fire akers ohio us Brent ronner mornings and weekends major hobby All lines after the first are used to indicate addresses to which this address is to be published Here Brent has decided that only Acme employees should be told of and be able to mail to his surveyor role In his fireman role he has decided that only people with Akers county addresses be able to use it And anyone may contact his runner role His regular address of Brent also remains open to all Task addresses provide two major benefits They provide a pre categorization of messages since messages sent to the same address are easily grouped together Secondly task addresses serve as attributes which may be tested during message rule evaluation in order to determine actions that should be taken with regard to a message Brent may wish to file runner addressed messages to different folders based on any races that they mention One rule attached to his runner address can do precisely this Take another example Suppose a user normally mailed to as Lars is head of an executive council meeting He wants to
36. ail users So a ready made market of electronic mail e mail users exists is familiar with basic techniques and inter personal protocols for using e mail and needs access to information sources on a daily basis E mail is a unique medium in that it works well for small working groups and large distributed interest groups The process of generating and sending a message is nearly the same whether it is intended for a single person or a thousand Messages are delivered and stored with no human intervention Recipients are free to read the messages whenever they want as frequently as they want Information sent can be further edited and included in other messages unlike facsimile or video broadcast transmissions or even voice mail But virtually all electronic mail systems are built around the short term processing needs that people have with a view of information as a disposable commodity It is true that many messages are short concern a single topic and are useful only during a particular time period But this is only part of the picture PIEmail systems help extend e mail to support longer term and greater capacity information access needs Our many years of participation in e mail communities lead us to believe that limitations in the tool sets for handling mail constrain the types of information sent and tasks performed via e mail We expect to improve communication clarity and to simplify collaborative needs in local and remote groups by ex
37. al gt PIEmail Technical Report DEMDO factorial rswOcs brown edu Nov 25 20 54 30 EDT 1991 rsw Nov 25 20 56 10 EDT 1991 Evaluates a Lisp expression LISP EXPR actype args creator create time modifier mod time eval elisp message Factorial of 5 Wd 5 4 3 2 rswOcs brown edu Nov 25 05 52 22 EDT 1991 rsw Nov 25 05 54 00 EDT 1991 Appendix D Sendmail Task Support Configuration 81 Appendix D Sendmail Task Support Configuration Included below is an example for UNIX system administrators of how to configure the sendmail cf file of the Sendmail MTA so that it can properly deliver task based addressed mail The example assumes that all task addresses are of the form lt user task gt or lt user task subtask gt All such mail is delivered to lt user gt if that is a valid local address The only change necessary is to add something like the following to the beginning of ruleset zero in the sendmail cf configuration file LRZ EEEE EZ EEE E Z EE EEZ EE EEE EE EEEE EEEE EEEE EEEE EEEE EEE EEEE EEE EEEE EEEE EEE HS Ht So On entry the address has been canonicalized and focused by ruleset 3 Handle special cases RO local n handle lt gt form Resolve the local hostname to LOCAL R x lt x w LOCAL gt x 1 lt 2LOCAL gt 4 thishost LOCAL R 2w uucp gt x 1 lt 2LOCAL gt 4 thishost uucp Handle personalized addresses for a set of
38. any desired buttons and may then be displayed via a menu selection button key A normalized form of a button label used internally by Hyperbole button label A text string that visually indicates a Hyperbole button location and provides it with a name and unique identifier Within a buffer buttons with the same label are considered separate views of the same button and so behave exactly alike Since button labels are simply text strings they may be embedded within any text to provide non linear information or operational access points A button is selected by pressing a Smart Key within its label The maximum length of a button label is limited by the variable ebut max len button selection The act of designating a Hyperbole button upon which to operate category A high level conceptual grouping of Hyperbole buttons into classes Implicit and explicit groupings represent categories class A group of functions and variables with the same prefix in their names used to provide an interface to an internal or external Hyperbole abstraction context A programmatic or positional state recognized by Hyperbole We speak of Smart Key and implicit button contexts Both are typically defined in terms of surrounding pat terns within a buffer but may be defined by arbitrary Emacs Lisp predicates Context may come to have a broader meaning within future versions of Hyperbole See Hyperbole environment explicit button A button created and managed b
39. apsulated under a Hyperbole user interface PIEmail uses the mouse handlers built into Hyperbole to offer a consistent interface All of Hyperbole s features described in this chapter are available to PIEmail Typical Hyperbole uses include personal information management l Overlapping link paths provide a variety of views into an information space A search facility locates buttons in context and permits quick selection documentation browsing Cross references may be embedded within documentation One can add a point and click interface to existing documentation link code with associated design documents or jump to the definition of an identifier from its use within code or its reference within documentation A table of contents composed from buttons can then be mailed to a group of potential readers allowing them to quickly check into sections of interest with little interruption to their workflow help training systems Tutorials with embedded buttons can show students how things work while explaining the concepts e g an introduction to local commands This technique can be much more effective than descriptions alone Hyperbole comes with a demonstration of its features that utilizes this principle Teaching assistants can answer questions electronically and provide pointers that reference relevant material archive managers Programs that manage archives from incoming information streams may be supple mented by having them add topic ba
40. arts of PIEmail and Hyperbole would be separated out for more general use by the rest of the environment This is one reason for doing object oriented designs to permit a loose coupling of components that aids in reimplementing them or shifting their place in an architecture PIEs are built from an assemblage of Tools which are relatively independent targeted applica tions and from Managers which provide inter tool environment support services Managers and Tools need not reflect large behavioral differences in fact we refer to both as PIE programs The main differences are that Managers should rely on other Managers but not on Tools Tools may also rely on Managers but only rarely on other Tools Managers are typically an expected part of a PIE whereas Tools are added in or removed as needed When we say that a Tool relies on a Manager we mean that the Tool cannot operate without the Manager s facilities Tools often will communicate with other Tools such as when a Mail Tool messages an Image Tool to display a graphic sent as a piece of mail The Mail Tool should still behave reasonably if the Image Tool is unavailable however Our PIE model stems from the tool based model in which programs are dedicated to specific tasks so that they may handle them well and may be built upon to exhibit more complex behaviors This parallels the object oriented model in which objects present abstract interfaces that may be generalized specialized and relat
41. ation of PIE programs PIE inter program messaging allows event based activation of programs So for example activating a hy perlink may invoke a program that is needed to view its referent Were the program to already be active however it would simply be messaged to display the referent 6 4 4 9 Rolodex Manager This is a much simpler program than the Database Manager It is meant to provide reasonable access to categorized lists of items like name and address records without the overhead or com plexity of a typical database system Its simplicity facilitates its use in a wider variety of Tools and Managers The rolodex used within PIEmail and Hyperbole is an example 56 PIEmail Technical Report 6 4 4 10 Schedule Manager The Schedule Manager is used to register time based actions It is similar to the Event Manager and the two may be combined in some PIEs An action is registered to occur either at a particular time or on a recurring basis The action consists of one or more messages routed through the Event Manager to one or more Tools that have registered to respond to the messages or to which it is directly addressed There should be a means of deferring actions if needed Tools are unavailable when actions trigger For example if a Mail Tool is a client resident on a non networked personal computer that periodically connects to a mail server where a Schedule Manager runs one might want to update the client s address book from the s
42. ation with additional material 3 2 Management Much of the value we place on information comes from its organization Organization influences information access quality and utility In the messaging domain senders supply the first level of organization the message Receivers can exercise control over all higher levels and can alter received messages to their liking if need be This section discusses PIEmail requirements for managing groups of messages 3 2 1 Categorizations One should be able to categorize messages to prioritize them to reorder them to produce groups of messages that match particular conditions and to tag messages with standard or personalized labels Categorization is critical to effective message management and location As message volume increases it is an all too common occurrence for important messages to become buried Prioritiza tion keeps unimportant messages from obscuring high priority ones that are categorized together By sorting on priority one can quickly see the messages that must be handled first Further one should be able to filter out messages that are irrelevant for the moment One can then get a clear view of particular messages e g those from your boss Another technique useful for filtering and grouping is to label messages with particular tags Priorities are a special case of this technique One can then search on and group by the label name whenever necessary 3 2 2 Conversations Co
43. button C 4 4 UNIX Man Apropos Buttons Below are some lines output by the UNIX apropos command with a little touchup for display purposes A button activation anywhere within such a line recognizes the line as an apropos entry and tries to display the man page for the entry Try it If you happen to use the superman package which fetches man pages in the background you ll have to wait for the next version of superman which removes incompatibilities with the standard man page fetch command before you can use these man apropos implicit buttons grep egrep fgrep 1V search a file for a string or regexp rm rmdir 1 remove unlink files or directories touch 1V update access and change times of a file cat 1V concatenate and display C 4 5 Key Sequence Buttons Any Emacs key sequence delimited with braces may be executed by activating it as a button for example C u C p should leave point four lines above the button line A help request upon the key sequence displays the documentation for its command binding i e what it does If it does not represent a bound key sequence it will not be treated as a key sequence button C 5 References Stallman87 R Stallman GNU Emacs Manual Free Software Foundation Cambridge MA March 1987 78 PIEmail Technical Report C 6 Button Attributes We include here a summary of all of the buttons that appear in the DEMO file generated with the EBut Help BufferButs
44. by using an expandable set of type definitions For example suppose Lindsey s committee is drafting a Be All Your Parents Weren t recruiting specification for the army she might define a new implicit reference type The type could say that any pattern like see section 8 should refer to the appropriate section in the specification She then could activate any such pattern as an implicit hypertext button from her PIEmail reader in order to display the referenced section 5 2 Hyperbole Concept Hyperbole is an open efficient programmable prototype information management system with a hypertextual flavor that we have developed to explore PIE concepts Its integration with PIEmail GNU Emacs and Epoch offers a rich working environment that can be tailored to a wide variety of information handling needs It is simple to use since it introduces only a few new mechanisms and provides user level facilities through a menu interface that may be controlled from either a mouse or keyboard Since Hyperbole is more mature than PIEmail we describe it operation in greater detail throughout this chapter Hyperbole consists of three parts 1 an interactive information management interface which anyone can use 2 a set of programming library classes for system developers who want to integrate Hyperbole with another user interface or as a back end to a distinct system 3 aset of hyper button types that provides core hypertext and other behaviors u
45. cepted the name together with its e mail address will be added after which the user may freely annotate the entry While composing mail one may enter a name or name fragment and then request that it be replaced by any associated e mail address This saves one from having to make extensive alias lists to make addresses easier to remember Personal e mail aliases from mailrc files and active local sendmail aliases may also be expanded to check that the proper addresses are being used Rolodex searches are simple and rapid One selects string or regular expression search from the menu and enters a search key Any matches found are displayed in another window If they contain Hyperbole buttons the buttons may be activated directly from the match buffer For example one could attach a link button to a sofware author s entry which pointed to his software archive Then one could retrieve the link by searching for the author the software package name included in text of the entry or the button label 2 9 Construct Management The Constructs menu is available to manage high level PIEmail constructs It contains the following items Construct Menu Descriptions Addresses Rolodex Address and contact information manager Buttons Hypertextual associative link buttons Conversations Sets of messages that reference one another Documents PIEmail related online documents Filters Grouping filters that alter the set of messages Groupin
46. cript Short Contents Apstract ata aaa net Go day 1 BEE aos 3 2 PIEmail Operation EE 5 3 PIlEmail Requirements AMA du mex ew x S Rat sea ae oerte dati he d 15 4 PIEmul Desgisss eaten nie he ios nyc a OS Rs 19 S C HYBerbole du uu nu au O II depu ee ace 29 6 Personalized Information Environments PDlEel use 49 Prior Works Sekt ex rr du E SE e ae e rea AE 4 etek a 9T CONCISO A AA tees 63 Acknowledgments EE 65 References A O 67 Appendix A gt Glossary sco EA ee ies cas 71 Appendix B Class Diagram Notation ooooooooomooooom o o 73 Appendix C Hyperbole Demonstration 00 00 cece ee eee rene 75 Appendix D Sendmail Task Support Configuration eese 81
47. d While their computers sit idle the mail waits in this box When they return after a few hour or few day hiatus they are confronted with an overwhelming calvalcade of unrelated messages which they must sift through and respond to sequentially Large message sets often slow mail readers greatly making this an even more frustrating task The rest of this report is organized as follows Section 2 1 PIEmail Operation page 7 includes a more detailed functional summary of PIEmail Section 3 4 2 PIEmail Requirements page 18 then covers system requirements before Chapter 4 PIEmail Design page 19 delves into the detailed design of PIEmail Chapter 5 Hyperbole page 29 discusses Hyperbole our associative information manager integrated with PIEmail Our broader view of PIEs are presented in Section 6 3 3 PIE Model page 52 Finally we compare our work with prior published work in Chapter 7 Prior Work page 57 The diagrammatic notation used throughout the report is explained in Appendix B Class Diagrams page 73 See Appendix A Glossary page 71 for a glossary of PIEmail related terms The chapter on Hyperbole has its own glossary however See Section 5 6 Hyperbole Glossary page 45 If any GNU Emacs terms are unfamiliar to you see section Glossary in the GNU Emacs Manual A basic familiarity with the Emacs editing model as explained in Stallman87 is useful when reading this document The material covered in the GNU Emacs tuto
48. d by users rather than administrators They allow users to specialize their mail address for any number of tasks without permitting spoofing or imitation of other users since each task address is a superset of a user s regular mail address So for example lt stu brown edu gt could use lt stu piemail brown edu gt or lt stu piemail ui brown edu gt to discuss his work in the design of a PIEmail user interface Eventually PIEmail will offer a standard means for requesting available task based addresses and integrating them into rolodex records number of security issues remain to be worked out since one generally wants to limit the distribution of task oriented information to particular parties This implies that one must be able to check somehow that the originating address of the request is valid and not an impersonation In anticipation of this let us consider a few examples of task address usage Brent who is a surveyor a volunteer fireman and an avid runner may create addresses for three roles surveyor fireman and runner His addresses would be Brent surveyor Brent fireman and Brent runner to which anyone may mail Of course any desired breakdown may be used Some people may prefer to assign roles for long and short term work tasks Chapter 4 PIEmail Design 25 To help people determine what addresses Brent has defined assuming they know his base address is Brent they can mail to Brent with a subject line of Send PIEm
49. d folders Queries on the other hand are gen erated interactively and are used across any number of opened or unopened folders Queries are generated by filling out a form much like entering an outgoing mail message Instead of sending mail however completed query forms are used as search criteria to locate matching messages across a set of folders One fills in the particular information known such as key words a sender address and the message sets over which to search Blank fields match to anything including non existence of the field Here is an example pis Query Form lt gt 2 e S S ses Search thesis stock market Sort by From To Subject mail amp amp information Dates 1 1 92 Attributes seen deleted Body We want to to look in the thesis and stock market folders for all messages whose subject lines contain both of the terms mail and information in either order The character at the start of the items in the Search field indicates that they are folders to be found in our folder directory Other paths may be searched by prefacing them with a or character We further restrict matches to messages from this year which have already been seen and are not marked for deletion Here is the query result 12 PIEmail Technical Report Folder or path Msg num Sender Date Priority Subject thesis 7 sfh 1 05 92 High Update on PIEmail and information environments work thesis 55
50. developed for PIEmail concurrently based on the same general PIEmail design One runs under GNU Emacs Stallman87 and may be used on terminals and UNIX workstations Under the X window version of Emacs called Epoch KaLoCaLa92 it offers a number of enhanced display features The other implementation offers a more refined user interface under the NeXTstep environment on a NeXT computer Hamlyn92 This document is concerned solely with the Emacs based version 4 1 PIEmail Invocation The pm class provides interactive entry exit and configuration points to PIEmail It maintains state such as the directories to which things are filed the PIEmail version number and many other configuration settings The pm version info command displays an extensive listing of PIEmail settings Pm also contains methods which invoke PIEmail read new mail file into folders according to personalized rule sets and display via chosen views and quit from the mail reader Message editing is a straightforward process since PIEmail operates within the GNU Emacs editor One simply requests that a message be edited it is then displayed in an editable fashion A special pm msg edit mode is used which provides all regular editing facilities plus two additional commands one which translates the results of the edit back to the message and another which aborts the edit 4 2 Entities PIE entities are the informational artifacts managed by a PIE All entities share certain ba
51. ds We should explore what we mean by personalization as this is the key term that separates our work from that of many others Personalization is the adaptation of an entity to meet individual or local needs Personalized information applications are task specific information management or access tools designed to be tailored for such needs Personalized information environments are information system service frameworks that can be shaped both manually and automatically to meet personalized needs Chapter 6 Personalized Information Environments PIES 51 A personalized system has to mold to its user s wishes For information management systems that means letting the user get to information in a way he finds convenient and helping him tie together informational chunks from multiple sources so that he can later access them as a single coherent chunk But what kind of needs are we talking about We categorize PIE needs along severallines user skills organizational conventions and growth paths 6 3 1 User Skills Any successful work in integrated environments must begin from the premise that users bring their own skill bases to any work they do The tradition of documenting and training people to use new computer applications as if they know nothing about how to interact with a computer and its tools is no longer sufficient If we do so we not only waste the skills that people have but we engender a high level of cognitive dissonance that manife
52. e Any Lisp mode Occur match Multi buffer occur match Outline Major Minor Modes Man Apropos Man Pages Buffer Menu Emacs Info Reader Menu Entry or Cross Ref Up Next or Prev Header File entry of Header End of current node Anywhere else Subsystems Calendar Dired Mode GNUS News Reader Mail reader and Summaries Any other context defaults PIEmail Technical Report Item is activated Button is activated Item help Button help Value copied to minibuffer lt same Value used as argument lt same Minibuf arg is applied Completion help Button is activated Button help Toggles narrow to one entry and edits entries Scrolls up a windowful Scrolls down Screen restored to previous state Jumps to id def Jumps to next def Jumps to id def Jumps to next def Jumps to match source line lt same Jumps to match source line lt same Collapses expands and moves outline entries Displays man page entry lt same Follows cross refs file refs and C code refs Saves deletes and displays buffers lt same Jumps to prior node Jumps to DIR node Jumpg to prev node cro 1s down a wind Jumps to referent Jumps to referent Jumps to top node Jumps to next node Scrolls up a windowful Scrolls or shows appts Scrglls or marks dates Views and deletes files from dipectory listing Toggles group subscriptions gets new news and browses articles Browses deletes and expunges messages Hyperbole top menu Smart Key summary
53. e EE TEE E 11 2 8 Rolodex Use is A KR ge E ME 12 2 9 Construct Management cae i o ai FERRE RE as 13 2 0 Document Reference ooooccccccccnoroccononencnconanaccc co 13 3 PIEmail Requirements seees 15 3 1 Browsing EE 15 3 1 1 Form Us ge ore eh emm merken oe koe a Penes 15 3 b2 Viewing oon rs E A EAS 15 3 1 3 Structure Handling 16 3 1 4 Address Capture lees nnne 16 3 2 Mamagel ent lerem a a a d pig pg oes 16 3 2 1 Categorizations cese nnne 16 3 2 2 Conversations eiren atarna e e ce he ea ey hs ia 16 3 2 9 SOUS 2 c ERN E SR S xd p o a 1T 3 2 4 Task Support cese decorrere Fev e kr R S 1T 3 2 5 Automation ole spe Coke y XX eaten E EAR Ee baa ed 17 3 9 Composition isis sida 17 A E Crees CERE 17 3 3 2 Hyperinkng ci o aa 17 3 4 Retrieval ii A A ele Es 18 SL CHETVING 6 ari a Ee 18 3 4 2 Address Lookup ooooocococorcrrrcraccra rr rr 18 4 PIEmail Deoslglbessesooc y E iR PREX ed cR Ce ieee os 19 4 1 PIEmail Invocation enhn 19 4 2 EMOS a eite tar dE 19 4 3 Malbhees oi io ee EE Een 20 AA Eolders ts a a 21 45 M sSages A adds 22 4 5 1 Message Attributes oooccoccocccrcconorarrncororor amo 22 4 5 2 Message Headers 4 5 3 Mess ge DO io cocidas REA anda 23 iii ii PIEmail Technical Report iv PIEmail Technical Report 4 5 4 Message Summaries ne 24 4 6 Dates cites Ru rr Er rm rr Ee rx eu wire Snares 24 4 7 Personalization Pacllilles 51 reru peser RE
54. e cohesive vision within which to see our own Nathaniel Borenstein of Bellcore and formerly of CMU kindly provided us with background information on the Andrew Message System and MIME Jim Rumbaugh and GE made OMTool available to our department with which we produced our design diagrams The Human Computer Interaction Bibliography Project organized by Gary Perlman of the Ohio State University pointed us to a number of references Perlman91 Finally the Brown Computer Science Department supplied a wonderful intellectual and work environment throughout our degree program e 66 PIEmail Technical Report References 67 References BoFr92 N S Borenstein and N Freed MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies Published as Internet Drafts June October December February 1991 92 Proposed Internet Standard expected April 1992 BoTh88 N S Borenstein and C A Thyberg Cooperative Work in the Andrew Message System Proceedings of the CSCW 88 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 1988 pp 306 323 BoTh91 N S Borenstein and C A Thyberg Power Ease of Use and Cooperative Work in a Practical Multimedia Message International Journal of Man Machine Studies 1991 34 2 pp 229 259 CaRoMa91 S K Card G G Robertson and J D Mackinlay The
55. ed for deletion are automatically expunged whenever the folder is saved 22 PIEmail Technical Report Pm fdr mode defines an interactive mode for operating on folders It provides operations to create open close delete expunge rename filter get new mail save and summarize folders Additionally one can attach and detach attributes and mailboxes test for the existence of a folder or any of its attributes Pm fdrsumm mode offers the same set of basic operations over folders that pm fdr mode does but in a form that lets one operate on multiple folders at once since it lists folders and summarizes their states one per line By marking a set of folders and then applying operations one can efficiently manage mail split across folders 4 5 Messages Pm msg is a large class because it contains all of the non attribute operations on messages Messages may be composed copied deleted edited included forwarded jumped to marked merged into a digest printed replied to saved sent undeleted and split apart from a digest Pm msg provides random access to messages by absolute message number physical folder order or by relative numbering when a filter has been applied to a folder Dynamic filtering can also be done during which a predicate is applied to each encountered message when a next or previous command is given and only messages meeting the predicate criteria are shown The predicate may involve criteria that change as one walks
56. ed to make use of them Priorities are always integers but may be assigned names like urgent for ease of use Whenever a priority is requested either the name or number may be given Priority value ranges are user 28 PIEmail Technical Report selectable but default from one to ten with lower numbers representing the more urgent priorities Standard priority names in decreasing order are urgent high medium low and trivial Pm priority alist specifies the priority values and names available to PIEmail If a message is not assigned a priority by a rule or interactively by a user it is given the default medium priority indicating that it has not yet been judged important or unimportant Because of this use medium priorities are not shown in message summaries as are other priorities The default priority can be changed by setting pm priority default 4 7 5 Links PIEmail includes a powerful associative linking feature explained in much more detail in the next chapter Links allow one to reference relevant material scattered across networks within messages without the need to copy the material This allows one to reference much more material than could be placed within a message It minimizes the size of messages and permits the reader to view the most up to date version of the referenced information whenever desired Links are accessed via buttons embedded in messages The PIEmail reader allows users to click on buttons to see what
57. ed to one another in order to build large systems Shared behaviors stimulate consistency throughout a working environment and reduce custom tool development time Users gain the consistency they desire without sacrificing the reusability that programmers need to be productive This perspective also yields models that closely parallel the activities and entities being modeled Program users who are familiar with the modeled domain can utilize their prior knowledge to navigate the system since they start with a conception of what recognized objects should do and how they interrelate to other parts of the system The point of developing PIEs is to simplify access to complex information spaces while also providing richer means of managing and retrieving distributed information components Even when a user is saddled with isolated tools which work only with individual media types a PIE framework should allow him to create aggregate multimedia structures each of whose components maintain links to the tools which can perform operations on them HP89 CaSh91 Then the user should be able to think in terms of and work with these aggregate cross media components 50 PIEmail Technical Report 6 2 Why Start with E mail Electronic mail is an excellent medium upon which to build initial PIE support It has emerged in research communitites as a primary form of both local and wide area communication Many business communities are also becoming heavy electronic m
58. emonstration 75 EA a A NN 75 02 Smart Key Handle eege ec 75 C 3 Explicit Button Samples iosuada EE 75 CA Implicit Button Samples 76 CAI Implicit Path Links cocine n ive onan NS e 76 C 4 2 Bibliography Buttons 77 C 4 3 Hyperbole Source Buttons 77 C 4 4 UNIX Man Apropos Buttons 77 CAS Key Sequence Buttons i020 Ce ENSCH aria 77 C5 Relerences sy a 77 CO Button Attributes Aca 78 Appendix D Sendmail Task Support Configuration 81 PIEmail Technical Report Chapter 1 Introduction 3 1 Introduction Electronic mail has emerged as one of the communications media of choice among technical professionals Most present day e mail tools have been designed with low volumes of mail in mind under the assumption that e mail represents just a small fraction of the information exchange that occurs The torrents of e mail that people are likely to receive in the coming decades require a fundamental change in e mail reader design to permit effective message management and integration within an electronic workspace Mackay88 PIEmail is a design that confronts these issues PIEmail reads standard UNIX mailboxes and files them according to personal rule sets into folders Folders may be browsed and handled in a similar fashion to the way net newsgroups are today Horton83 Rules may also annotate the messages with desired attributes such as priorities and expiration dates Mail is then read by selecting folders from
59. ent most notably the ability to share messages and to query over message bases Terry90 lays out high level requirements for the ongoing Tapestry message handling envi ronment being developed at PARC by discussing issues that researchers there have identified as important in the evolution of e mail systems In particular he identifies seven requirements 1 Give recipients control over what they read Free the sender from choosing recipients Provide shared storage Never delete anything Allow content based retrieval Enforce sender specified access controls on messages N Oar wn Convert messages into recipient desired format These are quite different from our requirements see Section 3 4 2 PIEmail Requirements page 18 and therefore bear future examination PIEmail offers support for requirements 1 5 and 7 The rest are really issues that if dealt with must be handled within an environment framework rather than a single tool They involve issues of administration user naming services and communication and file system security 7 5 Miscellaneous Although we expect PIEmail to be most appealing to heavy e mail users there is prior work that indicates a number of PIEmail s design features will work well for many audiences TsCh83 discusses the value of filtering over message bases and more generally in taking an information retrieval perspective to message management JeRo87 found that a forms based interface
60. ental rates Since one s knowledge base continues to expand PIEs should not limit the knowledge bases that one can acquire or tap User interfaces and media supported by PIEs should also be expandable to support new capabilities that emerge in these areas Chapter 6 Personalized Information Environments PIEs 53 6 4 Managers and Tools PIE Tools and Managers Bob Weiner 2 14 92 name Image Tool Calendar Tool D M EAS AN gt 1 EA Prog Mgr Schedule Mgr Agent Mgr COO E EH EE AOS AAA Context Mgr Present Mgr M AAA AS AA L i Mail Tool News Tool Hypb Mgr reader composer reader composer pm mailmsg pm newsmsg Hyperbole Button hbut pm log Evaluation Mgr evaluates evaluates Rule Expression The above diagram illustrates a sampling of Managers and Tools that we envision composing a PIE Let us take a look at the purposes of each Manager and Tool shown Be aware that all of the relations among the classes in this diagram are not shown as it is meant only to illustrate the PIE idea not to provide a design representation 54 PIEmail Technical Report 6 4 4 Managers PIE Managers provide core PIE functionality since their facilities are available to any existing or newly designed PIE Tools In this respect they serve as high level reusable components most classes being lower level components of reuse The few methods shown for the Manager class in the previous diagram serve
61. erver s through a scheduled action But this would not be possible until the client connected to the server and so could not in general be scheduled 6 4 4 11 Window Manager The Window Manager provides PIE programs with control over window placement sizing and other window attributes It should at least support both tiled and overlapping window styles It should permit grouping of windows and allow operations to be applied to these groups 6 4 5 Tools We describe only a few sample Tools below as examples of what a PIE might offer 6 4 5 1 Calendar Tool A Calendar Tool would manage a person s work schedule A more useful tool would also provide group and resource scheduling facilities Appointment reminders could make use of the Schedule Manager s services Calendar entries could be managed with the Database or Rolodex Manager whereas calendar views could utilize Presentation Manager mechanisms 6 4 5 2 Image Tool An Image Tool should display images and convert them among several formats for display It should permit editing component based images and support hyperlinks to and from image compo nents 6 4 5 3 Mall Tool A Mail Tool should offer personalized electronic mail handling along the lines of our PIEmail prototype A full PIE will permit a much simpler implementation of such a tool because of all the environmental support 6 4 5 4 News Tool A News Tool should support category based browsing and submission of news articles
62. ese expressions are often used to affect the PIE state This Manager also handles environmental rules Rules are just a special form of expression that often are chained together so that one rule triggers evaluation of others 6 4 4 5 Event Manager The Event Manager registers events that Tools and Managers are interested in receiving and then messages each as events of all types come into the environment It should support some form of event prioritization and may utilize different dispatch strategies at different times e g directing of all events of one type to a single Tool 6 4 4 6 Hypertext Manager This should offer core hyperlinking services that are useful to all different types of mediums that PIEs may support Hyperbole is a good example of such a manager By connecting it to editors that support other media types one could support hyperlinks in their entities that would be managed by Hyperbole 6 4 4 7 Presentation Manager This like the Agent and Database Managers is a major project unto itself The Presentation Manager permits specification of personal presentation requirements and then works with Tools to match output requests against these requirements Filtering ordering routing and formatting information would all be part of this Manager PIEmail demonstrates a number of presentation level personalization features with its view capabilities 6 4 4 8 Program Manager The Program Manager manages the start up and termin
63. esses and environments that could enhance man s ability to per form knowledge work far beyond his capabilities when not augmented This work was performed with a research team that he headed at Stanford Research Institute SRI It established the world of interactive computing and led to the development of the NLS system The Augmentation Research Center ARC as it came to be called did years of experiments with a number of cross disciplinary teams in order to develop effective methods and tools One should keep in mind the fact that NLS architecture was based on the results of examining real world issues as we discuss it NLS had at its base a file store that emphasized hierarchically structured node based files so that one could efficiently organize and hyperlink bits of information Each node actually called a statement in NLS had a permanent reference number attached that permitted its reference within a link Section titles paragraphs and diagrams each would typically be treated as a node Finer grained links could also be made to points within nodes Links were embedded within text and were easily human readable The idea of gaining different views over an information space appeared early in this research One would apply a view specification viewspec to a group of nodes to gain a particular perspective For example a table of contents view would show only section titles in a hierarchy Links could include viewspecs to indicate how
64. evious button locations in the reverse order of the way you traverse them You access it by selecting the Hist command from the top level Hyperbole menu C h h h Appendix C Hyperbole Demonstration 77 Now suppose you want to browse through a number of files within the Hyperbole distribution You could use the Emacs dired subsystem emacs Dired but a faster way is to note that files named MANIFEST and DIR are used to summarize the files in a directory so we can use each of their entries as an implicit button of dir summary type to take us to the file Let s look at MANIFEST Now click anywhere within a line in the MANIFEST file and you see that it is displayed as expected You can get help on these buttons just like any others C 4 2 Bibliography Buttons Here s a use of an bibliography reference implicit button which allows you to see a bibliography entry such as Stallman87 when you activate the button between brackets C 4 3 Hyperbole Source Buttons If you ask for help on the Stallman87 button the first line of the help buffer will look like this Qloc gt DEMO except it will contain the full pathname of the file If the button were embedded within a buffer without an attached file the first line of the help buffer might look like loc gt lt buffer scratch gt If you click on the buffer name the buffer will be displayed just as a file buffer would This type of implicit button is called a hyp source
65. folders Deletion copying archiving printing and setting or clearing an attribute such as priority may all be done to message sets If a new summary is produced from the folder it reflects only the messages in the current set Thus sets provide an efficient way of quickly processing large numbers of messages moving away from the traditional sequential processing of traditional e mail systems 2 5 Folder Use Messages may be grouped into folders either manually or automatically according to rule sets see Section 4 7 2 Rules page 26 All messages pertaining to a particular conversation are usually put into the same folder Folders thereby provide a natural reference point from which to seek out topic based information PIEmail supports the nesting of subfolders and allows for the storage of arbitrary user defined attributes in addition to a standard set of per folder attributes The Groupings menu handles groupings of messages stored as folders It offers these commands Groupings Menu Descriptions Attribute Sets or clears a folder specific attribute Create Creates a folder message grouping Delete Removes a folder and all of its contents List Displays available folders Open Reads messages in a folder Rename Names or renames a folder View Folder list view commands 2 6 Message Composition Outgoing mail messages are composed for three reasons 1 One wants to compose a new message for mailing 2 A reply need
66. for targeting specific mail and information delivery applications There is much work to be done to achieve the vision of an effective Personalized Information Environment But our initial work on PIEmail and Hyperbole point out that strides can be made quickly and that even prototypical tools can effectively elevate user performance Our broader expectation is that as personalization becomes a standard working component of peoples tool chests that we will see an entirely new generation of problems approached As the complexity of these new problems becomes mentally manageable we can leverage off the facilitation that our tools and working processes provide to tackle further issues as Doug Engelbart has so long argued in his augmentation papers EnEn68 Engelbart70 64 PIEmail Technical Report Acknowledgments 65 Acknowledgments Motorola Inc provided us with the opportunity and financial support to pursue this work We had the pleasure of Peter Wegner s advising and Stu Hamlyn s inputs throughout the course of this project We owe a great debt to Mark Lambert of Oracle Corp and formerly of MIT who provided his work on the pcmail package that formed a base for our PIEmail prototype Richard Stallman s and untold others work on the Free Software Foundation s GNU Emacs environment also made the prototyping a rewarding process Doug Engelbart of the Bootstrap Institute patiently explained his work and thereby gave us a larger mor
67. grate mail into the day to day information handling and communication environments of modern professionals In addition to standard sequential message processing features PIEmail offers automated message classification into folders queries over message bases task and role based mail addresses button based hypertext facilities and an extensible mail processing library We discuss the requirements for and design of PIEmail and illustrate its operation through a number of example uses The design is specified through a series of object oriented class relationship diagrams together with discussion of major classes PIEmail hyperlinks are provided through integration with the Hyperbole associative information manager Weiner92 We discuss the Hyperbole model and how it works together with PlEmail PIEmail is an initial step towards a larger Personalized Information Environment PIE model We briefly outline our view of a PIE architecture Finally we examine major prior related work Table of Contents WE ta AS 1 L Iuroducion SARA 3 2 PIEmail Operation v bea S otc EE 5 2 1 Interaction Techniques 02 cece eee eee cece nnn 7 2 2 Mal Reddi g s dates us oe ne Sticke AS a e Pd D Ras NAAA 7 2 3 Mail Summaries ele a Sb Sew bo a eee 8 2 4 Message Ordering and Filtering 0 0 ccc cece eee eee eens 9 2 5 Folder Use seve ices a wee eas SA 10 2 6 Message Composition cece petsu eee cece eee eee e ene eens 10
68. gs Folders Persistent groupings of messages Messages E mail messages with header and body structure Queries Interactive retrievals across folders Rules PIEmail automation condition action support Sorters Grouping ordering according to criteria Tasks Task or role based personalized addresses Views Specifications for PIEmail entity display 2 10 Document Reference The documents menu can be used to browse PIEmail documentation when one is looking for specific operational or design details Documents Menu Descriptions Copyright Displays PIEmail Emacs type copyright information Glossary Displays PIEmail glossary of terms InfoManual Displays PIEmail user manual in Info viewer Manifest Lists files in PIEmail distribution Report This report covering PIEmail design 14 PIEmail Technical Report Chapter 3 PIEmail Requirements 15 3 PIEmail Requirements Now that we have seen what PIEmail can do we back up a bit to examine the requirements behind it design As indicated earlier we see a mail reader s basic mission as a means of brows ing management composition and retrieval of messages Browsing requires a means of viewing messages generally from a number of different perspectives gained from sorting messages into dif ferent categories and orderings One also has to be able to find saved messages according to known criteria Message management should permit logging of outgoing messages tagging of mes
69. havior in such cases is undefined If there is no explicit button at point during a selection request then each implicit button type predicate is tested in turn until one returns non nil or all are exhausted The types are used in reverse order of definition so that personal types defined after standard system types take precedence It is important to keep this order in mind when defining new implicit button types By making their match predicates as specific as possible one can minimize any overlapping of implicit button type domains those contexts in which a type predicates match Once a type name is defined its precedence relative to other types remains the same even if you redefine the body of the type as long as you don t change its name This allows incremental modifications to types without having to worry about shifts in type precedence Implicit button types can be listed in decreasing order of precedence by using the Hyperbole Types menu mentioned later 36 Hyperbole Buttons Links and Actions Explicit Button ebut Hyperbole Button hbut butter butter current hbut label string act hbut action hbut at p is p object report amp optional arg source amp optional full actype actype action action args list creator string create time time Ibl key string loc filename or buffer modifier string mod time time create amp opt but sym delete amp opt but sym get amp opt ke
70. he same but whose labels appear different from one another due to text formatting conventions As an illustration all of the following would be recognized as the same button fake button fake button fake button E Panz lt fake Pam gt button gt lt fake me button gt fake x button gt The last three examples demonstrate how Hyperbole ignores common fill prefix patterns that happen to fall within the middle of a button label that spans multiple lines As long as such buttons are selected with point at a location within the label s first line the button will be recognized The variable hbut fill prefix regexps holds the list of fill prefixes recognized when embedded within button labels All such prefixes are recognized one per button label regardless of the setting of the GNU Emacs variable fill prefix so no user intervention is required 5 3 6 Operational and Storage Formats Hyperbole uses a terse format to store explicit buttons and a more meaningful one to show Chapter 5 Hyperbole 35 users and to manipulate during editing The terse format consists solely of button attribute values whereas the edit format includes an attribute name with each attribute value A button in edit format consists of a Lisp symbol together with its property list which holds the attribute names and values In this way buttons may be passed along from function to function simply by passing the symbol to
71. iar information spaces Files that are created specifically for this purpose we call button files The Hyperbole menu system gives quick access to two types of these button files personal and directory specific through the ButFile menu The variable hbmap filename contains the base name of these standard button files Its standard value is HYPB A personal button file may serve as a user s own roadmap to frequently used resources Selection of the ButFile PersonalFile menu item displays this file for editing The default personal button file is stored within the directory given by the hbmap dir user variable whose standard value is hyperb The standard Hyperbole configuration also appends all global buttons to the end of this file one per line as they are created So you can edit or annotate them within the file A directory specific button file may exist for each file system directory Such files are useful for explaining the contents of directories and pointing readers to particular highlights within the directories Selection of the ButFile DirFile menu item displays the button file for the current directory this provides an easy means of updating this file when working on a file within the same 44 PIEmail Technical Report directory If you want to view some other directory specific button file simply use the normal Emacs file finding commands One might suggest that menu quick access be provided for group specific and si
72. icit buttons they will wonder what the button data at the end of the message is You should therefore limit distribution of such messages For example if most people at your site read news with GNUS and use Hyperbole it would be reasonable to embed buttons in postings to local newsgroups In order to alert readers of your postings that you can utilize Hyperbole mail buttons embedded within personal replies the system automatically inserts the same comment that is included within mail messages to announce this fact See Section 5 5 4 7 Buttons in Mail page 44 for details and an explanation of how to turn this feature off 5 6 Hyperbole Glossary Concepts pertinent to operational usage of Hyperbole are defined here There are enough of them that we have separated them from the PIEmail glossary included as an appendix see Appendix A Glossary page 71 action An executable behavior associated with a Hyperbole button A specific class of actions which display entities are called links such as a link to a file action type A behavioral specification for use within Hyperbole buttons Action types usually contain a set of parameters which must be given values for each button with which they are associated An action type together with a set of values called arguments may be considered an action Actype is a synonym for action type activation Request for a Hyperbole button to perform its action Ordinarily the user presses a key which selec
73. ific key bindings which are more common today Mail messages were treated as structured objects and could include links across the fledgling Internet just like files Documents could also be submitted via mail to a permanent library type archive called the Journal as a form of electronic publication Some of these facilities are standard parts of today s computing environments but NLS was the first implementation of many of the concepts It is a much more extensive environment than we can portray here and remains today the only system we can point to that offers a firm architectural basis for a PIE Unfortunately NLS was never ported to modern hardware As a result only one remaining machine in the world runs NLS it is used by Engelbart and his staff Hyperbole s integration with PIEmail offers many of the kinds of NLS features surveyed above in slightly different forms View specification work for Hyperbole is in progress and should offer an extensible view mechanism with the same kinds of viewspecs as NLS The major component of NLS that is unavailable with Hyperbole is the node based filesystem This limits to some extent the kind of in file linking that can be done but does not hinder the kind of outline processing facilities that Hyperbole can utilize As a final note we claim that Engelbart s research on augmentation systems offers much evidence for the value of PIEs His work has shown that continuous feedback from user experience to p
74. igh 143 Ln kurt Think COM Electronic books 2 30 Mar 92 10 Ln To rsw pie Here s a lt button gt gt 3 01 Apr 92 Urgent 6 Ln To rsw Meeting at 1pm 4 01 Apr 92 Trivial 34 Ln hws csis dit csiro Assertions in Sather 5 01 Apr 92 Pr 6 6 Ln To rsw Priority example This table illustrates many PIEmail facilities The pointer on the extreme left indicates that the currently selected message is number 3 Three fields over we have the Priority field It may be set by message categorization rules or interactively after a message is read Priorities may be given as names messages 1 3 and 4 or as numbers message 5 Each priority name equates to a Chapter 2 PIEmail Operation 9 number so that messages may be ordered by priority A priority value of 6 has no name equivalent so it is displayed numerically with the Pr prefix message 5 The Lines field indicates the message length to help one determine whether to read lengthy messages or to save them for later The number of bytes in the message may also be shown The Sender field shows the orginator of the message messages 1 and 4 except when the message sender id is the same as the reciever s user id messages 2 3 and 5 In those cases the recipient field is shown instead with a To prefix This is most useful when the addressee is different than the user id Message 2 for example was sent to a task address rsw pie used to deal specifically with PIE issues Another useful case is whe
75. ine lists the attributes set for the current message Some attributes have binary values and are added and removed to indicate present state such as deleted answered or filed Others are multi valued such as priority Chapter 4 PIEmail Design 23 Here is summary of standard PIEmail message attributes Others may be defined by users answered A reply has been mailed to the sender copied Message has been copied to another folder deleted Message is marked for deletion by the expunge operator edited Message has been edited in some way since reception expired Message is now due for time based removal filed Message has been saved to a file forwarded Message has been resent to another address precious Messages with this attribute should never be deleted printed Message has been printed to paper from within PIEmail priority Message prioritization by keyword or number timely Message is marked for expiration on some date undigestified A digest message has been unpacked into individual messages unseen Message has not yet been read The pm attr class handles message attributes It provides methods to set and get attributes and their values to clear attributes to toggle binary attributes and to test whether a message or message set contains an attribute It also permits a user to define and attach his own attributes to messages 4 5 2 Message Headers Message header field operations are part of the pm hdr class It p
76. information may at times be referenced within messages rather than included to minimize message size and the amount of out of date information sent If a message is sent to a mail list with a number of attachments there is a good likelihood that a number of the list members will just throw it away mostly unread If links rather than attachments 18 PIEmail Technical Report were sent only those interested would follow the links and use the bandwidth necessary to transfer the information to their local display In the long run such a strategy could represent large savings in communications Since many mail transfer agents limit the size of messages this would offer a solution that permits the mailing of messages linked into wide area information bases without the need to transfer all of the associated information in the message Both textual header fields and textual body components should be able to carry hypertext buttons that link to external information or that perform other actions 3 4 Retrieval Retrieval facilities can help motivate efforts at message organization Organizational work is worthwhile if one can then locate desired information when needed Full text searching is the preferred retrieval technique in messaging domains because the known information used for searches may often be scanty For those times where one knows which fields particular information occurs in structured searches should also be permitted 3 4 1 Querying
77. interactive Hyperbole demonstration that comes with the Hyperbole distribution We hope eventually to have a similar demonstration that covers PIEmail C 1 Overview This file demonstrates simple usage of the basic Hyperbole button action types and shows how Hyperbole can support a style of self documenting interactive files See the glossary in The Hy perbole Manual hypb info Glossary if terms used here are unfamiliar to you C 2 Smart Key Handling This button prints the lt factorial gt of 5 in the minibuffer when activated with the primary Smart Key normally the middle mouse button Once you have Hyperbole installed just click on the word lt factorial gt If you use the secondary Smart Key normally the right mouse button you get help for the preceding button The help provides a summary report of the button You will see that it utilizes the eval elisp action type You can also see who created it Try it Note that the create time and mod time are displayed using your own timezone but they are stored as universal times So if you work with people at other sites you can mix their buttons with your own within the same document and see one unified view of the modification times on each button These times will also be useful for sorting buttons by time when such features are provided in future Hyperbole releases To display the top level Hyperbole menu click the Smart Key anywhere within this paragraph or alternati
78. interfaces An event driven architecture can allow different devices to generate the same events So one could allow selection of an information artifact via keyboard mouse or programming Each device need only generate the event so supporting multiple devices or user interface styles requires little extra code 6 3 2 Organizational Conventions We also use personalization to refer to adaptation to local group needs For example mainte nance of an electronic meeting announcement form and database would likely be administered by a group This emphasis may seem at odds with our ideas for individual personalization but we instead see it as another level of personalization An individual remains free to further personalize his views and access tools for such meeting announcements but management of the information remains at the group level where it belongs Personalization is thus a relative concept that must always be examined in the context of how broadly information is to be shared 52 PIEmail Technical Report 6 3 3 Growth Paths Productive workers continually expand their knowledge and skill bases PIEs enhance their ability to do so But one must still be concerned about developing past the point where a PIE can help If such a point can be reached quickly by particular groups of people they will have little incentive to migrate towards PIE usage PIEs are therefore open ended to deal with the variety of initial skill bases and developm
79. ironment is available to Hyperbole we do not speak of this as part of the Hyperbole environment A text or group of texts which may be explored in a non linear fashion through associa tive linkages embedded throughout the text Instead of simply referring to other pieces of work hypertext references when followed actually take you to the works themselves implicit button A button recognized contextually by Hyperbole Such buttons contain no button data See also implicit button type implicit button type A specification of how to recognize and activate implicit buttons of a specific kind Implicit button types often utilize structure internal to documents created and managed without Hyperbole assistance for example programming documentation Ibtype is a synonym for implicit button type See also system encapsulation instance number link A colon prefaced number appended to the label of a newly created button when the button s label duplicates the label of an existing button in the current buffer This number makes the label unique and so allows any number of buttons with the same base label within a single buffer A reference from a Hyperbole button to an entity The referenced entity is sometimes called a node or referent A specific class of actions which display entities are called links such as a link to a file local button file See button file local mouse button mouse key node See Smart Key See link
80. ke snapshots of a PIE s state and then later restore these contexts A simple scenario is to save a PIE context at system logout time and to restore it upon login more useful working scenario is to establish different contexts for different work tasks and to jump among them at will The Window Manager should work with the Context Manager to permit the display of only those programs and entities needed within each context PIE Tools should utilize services offered by the Context Manager to permit straighforward saving and restoring of their contexts Then one could restore Tool contexts either individually or in groups PIE contexts like all PIE entities may be named and therefore retrieved by name The particular interface details are left to fit within a specific PIE design 6 4 4 3 Database Manager The Database Manager should offer an object oriented database framework so that it may be useful in PIE entity and program management It should in fact be used as a bootstrapping facility in the construction of a PIE as a means of maintaining object integrity and providing query facilities with which to inspect environmental facilities Chapter 6 Personalized Information Environments PIEs 55 6 4 4 4 Evaluation Manager The Evaluation Manager works closely with the Event Manager The two may in practice be merged lt evaluates expressions which the Event Manager or other programs may generate and returns the result to its input source Th
81. l View blank lines non neg int position pos int end pos int sect name string max level pos int start pos_int ll EEE ARA A ar Chapter 5 Hyperbole 37 5 5 Using Hyperbole This section covers more of the user view of Hyperbole Often a number of overlapping interac tion methods are provided to support different work styles and hardware limitations A user need learn only one with which he can become comfortable in such instances The DEMO file included in the Hyperbole distribution demonstrates many of Hyperbole s stan dard facilities It provides a good example of how buttons may be used It is replicated as an appendix for reference See Section C 6 Hyperbole Demo page 78 38 PIEmail Technical Report 5 5 1 Smart Keys Hyperbole Default User Interface Bob Weiner 4 06 92 Hyperbole Client AAA EA mouse or key events smart key alist Pred Actype LIst palist mc ic eval help meta Smart Key functions cause mouse amp rest args evaluation of smart key allst mouse meta amp rest args which activates Hyperbole smart key buttons scrolls and performs smart key meta other context sensitive actions summarize dependent on the current mode members Predicate Actype predact predicate bool form activator Hyperbole Button hbut buffer buffer current hbut label string act hbut action hbut at p is p object report amp optiona
82. l arg source amp optional full GNU Emacs API Hyperbole provides two special keys that perform different operations in different contexts as explained below By default these two keys are bound to your middle and right mouse keys when Hyperbole is run under an external window system mouse configuration is automatic for the X Window System SunView and Apollo s Display Manager if your GNU Emacs program has been built with support for any of these window systems The middle key is called the primary Smart Key or just Smart Key and the right is called the secondary Smart Key or Smart Meta Key By default if smart key init is left set equal to t in Chapter 5 Hyperbole 39 heite el then C u M RET may also be used as the primary Smart Key and M RET may be used as the secondary Smart Key These key bindings allow context sensitive operation from any keyboard The primary Smart Key generally selects entities and activates buttons The secondary Smart Key generally provides help such as reporting on a button s attributes or serves a complementary function to whatever the primary Smart Key does within a particular context When Hyperbole is installed a key may be bound which allows you to switch between the Smart Key mouse bindings and your prior ones C h w sm mouse toggle bindings RTN shows any key which performs this command A prime design criterion of Hyperbole s user interface is that one should be able check what
83. ld provide multi modal interfaces by separating commands from the interaction means used to execute them Users should then be free to associate commands with the input techniques they are used to or find they prefer 62 PIEmail Technical Report Conclusion 63 Conclusion PIEmail offers an extensive set of contributions beyond traditional e mail readers We can summarize them as follows CONTRIBUTIONS SUPPORT FACILITIES Automated mail processing rules task addresses Executable mail components buttons links Grouping of messages folders sets priorities Selecting message groups filters Deep customization facilities rules views filters sorters Effective retrieval of mail queries Conversation handling conversations Addressee management rolodex Hyperbole presents a working prototype of a powerful personal information manager It offers extremely intuitive browsing capabilities and excellent extensibility to meet specific application demands Its integration with PIEmail permits wide area hyperlinking and saves on communication costs by lowering the number of necessary enclosures Our PIEmail design philosophy has been heavily user centered for two reasons We seek to demonstrate the important productivity impact that effective interfaces can have in collaborative information intensive tasks We further want to make the systems appealing enough to encourage adoption as both end user tools and frameworks
84. local users CW e Y List users on following line who may use task personalized addresses CP rsw To enable for all users instead substitute for all P below If you want to use some other character than as the task separator character change its usage below R zP x 0 j5 local 1 user anything domain R P x lt 0 j gt local 1 user anything host dom R P lt LOCAL gt local 1 user token local R P 7W local 1 user token R P W 7W local 1 user token token2 ERBRARRRRERERRARARRRAARARARERRARERARARRRARRARRA RARA RARARARRRARARARA NARRAR Once installed to test this setup you can use the following script and just examine the output to see if addresses were parsed to your satisfaction You should first change all occurrences of cs brown edu in the script to your own domain bin csh f Substitute the name of the sendmail configuration file you want to test for sendmail cf below If it is not in the current directory use a full pathname Also substitute your domain name for all examples of cs brown edu below 82 PIEmail Technical Report Then run the script like script gt tmp tmp And look at the output in tmp tmp usr lib sendmail bt Csendmail cf oQqueue lt lt EOF 3 0 4 root a root rolei role2 root root Ocs brown edu 3 0 4 root ri r2 cs brown edu mit edu root ri r2 cs 3 0 4 root ri bu edu EOF End of s
85. mall for such a flexible tool and requires only a few seconds to load and to initialize Individuals can choose to use it with very little administrator support Therefore we see it as a more accessible mail tool through which one can build as much sophistication as necessary to meet local needs 1 3 Information Lens Tom Malone s Information Lens work popularized the term semistructured message illustrating automatic processing of task oriented message forms by using special purpose field information encoded in the message headers MaGrLa87 Information Lens provided personalized mail handling forms and rule based processing on ded icated Lisp machines Studies of Information Lens users demonstrated that rule based e mail handling can be useful to both light and heavy e mail users MaMaCr89 Current work on Object Lens has a broader goal of allowing process modeling and automation by non programmers for example sequenced message routing to automate a purchasing approval process It is a prototype in Lisp on a Macintosh LaMa91 60 PIEmail Technical Report 7 4 PARC Work Xerox Corporation s Palo Alto Research Centers PARC has long been a leader in collaborative technology research Many research efforts have targeted electronic mail handling as a key compo nent of future office information environments The Walnut mail manager DoOr85 developed at PARC demonstrated the possibilities in using a full database system for mail managem
86. n the mail is to a mail list of which the sender is a member The To address might be To PIEmail users By placing that mail list name in the summary with the To prefix it stands out a bit Then one knows that it is one of your own messages and can be ignored or only scanned briefly The final field is the Subject field Message 2 includes a Hyperbole button in its subject field The button may be activated from either the message summary or the message view It could provide a link to a remotely stored file or directory It could open a folder or demonstrate other PIEmail facilities See Chapter 5 Hyperbole page 29 2 4 Message Ordering and Filtering Messages are stored in folders as they are read in from a mailbox Folders can grow larger than one may want for particular tasks Often one wants to see them in a different order or look at just a subset of available messages PIEmail offers sorters and filters to provide alternate views of the messages within a folder Built in sorters include by date time of mailing by sender by receiver by subject or conversation and by priority Other sorters may be defined with a small amount of programming and easily installed into PIEmail The sorters menu enables management and application of sorters Sorters Menu Descriptions Apply Applies a sorter to current view Create Creates a new message sorter Delete Deletes a message sorter Edit Edits a sorter Rename Renames a sorter
87. ng data formats that it must deal with to provide uniform access to messages in a variety of formats Specifically PIEmail can read messages from mailboxes written in the following formats USENET News Berkeley Unix Babyl RMAIL and MH New formats are straightforward to add PIEmail takes the mail from mailboxes and normalizes it into a mail folder format called Babyl originally developed at MIT and meant to provide a common intermediate format for a variety of mail systems Babyl is also the format used by the default GNU Emacs mail reader Rmail The pm baby1 class handles this mail format which consists of a folder header followed by a series of messages with cached information about each message and its attributes preceding the normal message headers The pm baby1 class encapsulates all of this specific formatting in order to provide other parts of PIEmail with structured access to message and folder contents Babyl folder methods are provided to test whether a folder is in Babyl format to operate upon folder attributes to create folders to attach or detach mailboxes from a folder to cache information about a folder s contents and to read mail from mail drops or other folders Babyl message methods include extraction of named header fields and conversion to a Babyl formatted message The pm attr class supports Babyl message attributes The pm fdr class supports PIEmail folder operations The pm msgsumm class is closely related as
88. nt and it will grab the appropriate thing and show it to you at the input prompt within the minibuffer If you click on the same thing again it accepts the entity as the argument and moves on Thus a double click registers a desired argument Double quoted strings pathnames mail messages Info nodes dired listings buffers numbers completion items and so forth are all recognized at appropriate times All of the argument types mentioned in the documentation for the Emacs Lisp interactive function are recognized This direct selection technique is very easy to get used to with just a little practice 42 PIEmail Technical Report Wherever possible standard Emacs completion is offered see section Completion in the Gnu Emacs Manual Remember to use to see what your possibilities for an argument are Once you have a list of possible completions on screen you can double click the Smart Key on any one to enter it as the argument 5 5 4 Working with Explicit Buttons Explicit buttons provide the building blocks for creating personal or organizational hypertext networks with Hyperbole This section summarizes the user level operations available for managing these buttons 5 5 4 1 Creating The most efficient way to create an explicit button interactively is to mark a short region of text in any fashion allowed by GNU Emacs and then to select the Hyperbole menu item sequence Ebut Create You will be prompted for the button s label with
89. nted Modeling and Design Prentice Hall Englewood Cliffs New Jersey 1991 References 69 ShHaMcNe90 M Sherman W J Hansen M McInerny T Neuendorffer Building Hypertext on a Multimedia Toolkit An Overview of Andrew Toolkit Hypermedia Facilities Proceed ings of the ECHT 90 European Conference on Hypertext 1990 pp 13 24 Shneiderman82 B Shneiderman The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manip ulation Behavior and Information Technology 1982 1 3 pp 237 256 Stallman87 R Stallman GNU Emacs Manual Free Software Foundation Cambridge MA March 1987 Stone91 D Stone AUGMENT s Support of Organizations A Brief History Bootstrap Insti tute Palo Alto CA 1991 AUGMENT 132615 Terry90 D B Terry 7 Steps to a Better Mail System Xerox Palo Alto Research Centers Technical Report CSL 90 12 September 1990 TsCh83 D Tsichritzis and S Christodoulakis Message Files ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 1983 1 1 pp 88 98 Weiner92 B Weiner Hyperbole Manual Brown University Providence RI 1992 Available elec tronically via anonymous ftp from anonymous wilma cs brown edu pub hyperbole WiWhGoJo83 D Wixon J Whiteside M Good and S Jones Building a User Defined Interface Proceedings of the CHI 83 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1983 pp 24 27 Vodeg Praqa reurd 04 Appendix A Glossary 71 Appendix A Glossary
90. nversation summaries should be offered so one can see how discussion has developed i e who replied to whom and what was said Lack of conversation tracking has long plagued electronic mail tools It is a chicken and egg problem Due to the weakness of e mail readers people often try to process and delete messages quickly to keep from being inundated Then it becomes impossible to track the conversation because the messages are gone A richer set of views of message bases reduces the need to remove messages permanently permitting more comprehensive tracking of inter message relations Chapter 3 PIEmail Requirements 17 3 2 3 Sets Most operations available for individual messages should be available for sets of messages This seems a natural requirement since our aim is to reduce the amount of time spent processing mail while increasing the utility of messaging When scanning message summaries one often finds a number of messages that need to be processed in the same way If one could group the messages and then apply a procedure to the group this could frequently save a good deal of time not to mention the immense mental distraction of repeating an operation over and over again 3 2 4 Task Support Users should be able to create their own mail addresses in a way that supports project oriented work but does not permit spoofing of another user We want to put mail handling control into the hands of the receiver rather than the sender A user co
91. o Glossary creator rswQOcs brown edu create time Dec 10 03 11 29 EDT 1991 keyboard macro Executes KBD MACRO REPEAT COUNT times actype exec kbd macro args S F xdescribe function M M U 1 creator rswOcs brown edu create time Nov 25 20 38 11 EDT 1991 modifier rsw mod time Apr 10 18 34 06 EDT 1992 lt maximum length gt Evaluates a Lisp expression LISP EXPR actype eval elisp args message Max length of explicit button labels fd char acters ebut max len creator rswOcs brown edu create time Nov 25 20 48 26 EDT 1991 shell command Executes a SHELL CMD string asynchronously actype exec shell cmd args 1s 1 DEMO nil nil creator rswOcs brown edu create time Nov 25 20 42 32 EDT 1991 modifier rsw mod time Dec 13 15 07 43 EDT 1991 ct login gt Displays a PATH in another window scrolled to optional POINT actype link to file args u rsw login creator rswQcs brown edu create time Nov 26 01 01 08 EDT 1991 modifier rgy mod time Dec 13 15 12 02 EDT 1991 tmp directory Displays a DIRECTORY in Dired mode in another window actype link to directory args tmp creator rswOcs brown edu create time Nov 26 00 03 37 EDT 1991 factorial alias Performs action given by another button specified by KEY and KEY FILE actype link to ebut 80 args creator create time modifier mod time lt factori
92. oard via the Smart Key See Section 5 5 1 Smart Keys page 38 Each menu item may offer its own help The first menu item Help displays a section of the PIEmail documentation that explains menu operation Succeeding items support moving throughout a folder These are followed by deletion commands and then message composure commands A few folder operations are included followed by some attribute commands and finally some menu control items Menus are in fact available to control many aspects of PIEmail operation with keyboard alternatives also offered The construct menu described later gives direct access to submenus that manage PIEmail facilities Hyperbole has its own menus see Section 5 5 2 Operating Menus page 41 Menus of Hyperbole buttons may also be constructed to perform personalized actjons 2 3 Mail Summaries A summary of the folder s message headers may be generated with the pm msgsumm create command bound to h for header summary Most of the message commands from the folder buffer may be given from the summary buffer The folder and summary views are often on screen at the same time so the effect of an operation in one is immediately reflected in the other The summary format is wholly user configurable except that it must include message numbers at the start It typically contains the sender s address the date sent and the subject Here is a personal sample Num Date Priority Lines Sender Subject 1 25 Mar 92 H
93. ocess messages Sendmail The Berkeley UNIX mail transfer agent used by many Internet hosts A simple cus tomization to a Sendmail mail processing rule set permits the use of task addresses under PIEmail See Appendix D Sendmail Tasks page 81 Set A set of items Most commonly a set of messages to which PIEmail operations are applied Sorter A named method for sorting entities Subfolder A folder that is a specialization of its parent Task A work task that is assigned a PIEmail address to simplify rule processing and catego rization View A PIEmail construct that provides a perspective on a set of entities Appendix B Class Diagram Notation 73 Appendix B Class Diagram Notation The diagrams used herein utilize the notation from RuBIPrEdLo91 Their notation is in turn derived from the entity relationship notations that relational database modelers have long used but refined for use with object oriented models In the text Rumbaugh et al discuss three different design views and notations an object model a dynamic model and a functional model For our purposes in this work we have used only the object model and only a subset of its notation that we explain here Boxes represent classes although in the diagrams labeled with the term concept they represent abstract functional units Sometimes class boxes are segmented into three parts which from top to bottom are the class name its attributes and its methods In most cases
94. over large message bases Traditonal systems offer a single mail composition form with no means of providing targeted forms to meet various messaging needs PIEmail supports selection from among user or sited defined composition forms It also has an integrated rolodex which can rapidly retrieve addresses for use during mail composition so one is not burdened with remembering addresses or having to create aliased names for each user 2 1 Interaction Techniques PIEmail offers three overlapping means of reading mail so that users may use any and all means they find comfortable 1 Direct manipulation Shneiderman82 may be used Folders from the folder list may be selected to open them and to summarize the messages therein Selection of a message summary item displays the associated message A click on a Hyperbole button activates it One can also click at the end or beginning of a message to move to the next or previous message 2 Commands may be invoked directly from the keyboard as in traditional mail readers 3 Commands may also be selected from menus minimizing the need to learn any command set 2 2 Mail Reading PIEmail is built atop the GNU Emacs editor So when using PIEmail interactively one first starts GNU Emacs and then invokes PIEmail to read mail PIEmail can be started by selecting a menu entry or with M x pm RIN With default settings it reads any waiting mail and displays a list of available folders To read individual
95. p function Implicit button types may use the same action types that explicit buttons do Implicit buttons never have any button data associated with them They are recognized in context based on predicate matches defined within implicit button types For example Hyperbole recognizes file names enclosed in double quotes and can quickly display their associated files in response to simple mouse clicks Standard implicit button types include annot bib Displays annotated bibliography entries referenced internally delimeters 34 PIEmail Technical Report dir summary Detects filename buttons in files named MANIFEST or DIR grep msg Jumps to line associated with grep or compilation error msgs Messages are recognized in any buffer hyp source Makes source entries in Hyperbole reports into buttons that jump to source Info node Makes file node buttons display the associated Info node kbd key Executes a key sequence delimited by curly braces man apropos Makes man apropos entries display associated man pages when selected pathname Makes a delimited valid pathname display the path entry Also works for delimited and non delimited ange ftp pathnames rfc toc Summarizes contents of an Internet rfc from anywhere within rfc buffer 5 3 5 Button Label Keys Hyperbole uses a normalized form of button labels called button keys or label keys for all internal operations The normalized form permits Hyperbole to recognize buttons that are t
96. pecification of field based forms together with the behavior needed to fill them out At a minimum one should be able to constrain the header fields visible when messages are displayed and to alter the field layout in message summary views One should be able to create forms for particular message composure tasks e g a meeting notice form 3 1 2 Viewing Facilities for browsing of available message categories and the messages filed within each category should be offered along with summaries of messages within a category Standard mail handling functions like deletion need to be included One should be able to move quickly from one category to another and to have multiple categories open for browsing at the same time 16 PIEmail Technical Report 3 1 3 Structure Handling PIEmail should treat messages as semistructured entities MaGrLa87 That is it should make use of particular structural requirements that messages must satisfy and allow other parts to be free form Messages are composed from a series of header fields together with their values Message headers are followed by a possibly empty body The body may contain multiple parts if the header contains a multipart valued Content type header field 3 1 4 Address Capture When a message comes in from someone unfamiliar one should be able to quickly add his name and mailing address information to a personal address book The address book should also permit free annotation of this inform
97. rial normally bound to C h t within Emacs is more than sufficient as background 4 PIEmail Technical Report This is a technical report on PIEmail not a user manual As such it provides only a cursory view of how one would actually operate the PIEmail reader Another document will eventually fill this other need leading the user step by step through all of PIEmail s operational specifics Chapter 2 PIEmail Operation 5 2 PIEmail Operation This chapter gives basic details on PIEmail operation Complete details are to be included in alater user manual Organization invocation message handling and retrieval and address lookup are presented First let us look at the conceptual organization of PIEmail and contrast it with a traditional mail reader like the UNIX mail command PlEmail Concept saves address to activates gets from reads trom BROWSING MANAGEMENT RuleEvaluator Y files msg to REE Rule evaluation permits automation of desired mail handling tasks RETRIEVAL gets address from Rolodex retrieves address for The Rolodex supports rapid address and other contact information lookup and capture views set of folders NTT s nmm 3 i tn Bob Weiner 5 10 92 The Reader is used to browse messages and folders and to get new mail from one or more mailboxes applies Viewer views set of msgs Filters and Sorters to compose sets for viewing Folders offer permanent categories
98. rocess organization to system design can produce distinctly non linear gains in productivity Engelbart82 Personalization support at an environment level rather than a per application level affords people a choice of working style and allows them to make effective use of it across many of the tasks they must perform As the gains become noticeable the incentive to work on feedback based improvements increase until a point of diminishing returns yielding a productivity enhancement process that can rapidly evolve towards desired goals The power of this approach can be seen in Stone91 which surveys a number of AUGMENT applications that show evidence of being far ahead of other work of their time AUGMENT was the commercial name for the NLS research environment 7 2 Andrew Message System The Andrew Message System AMS RoEvBo87 BoTh88 was built as an exemplar framework for the large scale Andrew project at CMU It offers a rich message handling environment designed to encourage asynchronous collaboration among large diverse sets of users AMS was built from the Andrew Toolkit and so contains a number of hypermedia facilities ShHaMcNe90 BoTh91 describes the most commonly used mail reader built from AMS Messages focusing on its collaborative facilities It supports folders and multimedia mail including formatted text Messages may be processed in groups just like PIEmail s sets The accessability of message bases may be made private
99. rovides the low level format dependent interfacing to message headers It can assist the pm msg class by taking a list of header fields to hide from view and returning only other header fields for viewing Header field values may be requested header fields may be tested for existence and fields may be added and deleted Priorities for instance are added to messages by adding a Priority header field with the priority s numeric value Message expiration is also handled this way An expiration date header is added to the message and checked for expiration whenever the folder is opened 4 5 3 Message Sets Message sets are common groupings of messages All the messages following a particular thread of conversation and all the messages in a folder are some examples Most of the operations that can be applied to individual messages may also be applied to sets through the pm set class These include copy delete display expire print save undelete and attribute setting and testing Additional set specific operations include filter list size and sort 24 PIEmail Technical Report 4 5 4 Message Summaries Message summaries provide an overview of message sets according to a selected view Pm msgsumm is the message summary class Pm msgsumm mode supplies an interactive mode for mes sage summaries It offers the same facilities as pm msg mode and additionally permits selection of different views to obtain different perspectives over message
100. s Button operation may be tested any time before a message is sent A person who does not use Hyperbole enhanced mail readers can still send messages with embedded buttons since mail composing is independent of any mail reader choice Hyperbole buttons embedded within received mail messages act just like any other buttons The mail does not contain any of the action type definitions used by the buttons so the receiver must have these or she will receive an error when she activates the buttons Buttops which appear in message Subject lines are copied to summary buffers whenever such summarieg are generated Thus they may be activated from either the message or summary buffers Nothing bad will happen if a mail message with explicit buttons is sent to a non Hyperbole user The user will simply see the text of the message followed by a series of lines bf button data at its end Hyperbole mail users never see this data in its raw form In order to alert readers of your mail messages that you can utilize Hyperbole mail buttons the system automatically inserts a comment into each mail message that you compose to announce this fact The variable smail comment controls this behavior See its documentation for technical details By default it produces a message of the form Comments Hyperbole mail buttons accepted vX XX where the X s indicate your Hyperbole version number You can cut this out of particular messages before you send them If you don t
101. s Searching for Company retrieves all listed employees Names are stored in last name first name order for ease of sorting Records are otherwise free form except that e mail addresses are normally delimited with lt and gt symbols for ease of location They may however be recognized heuristically by their format if the delimiters are not used Hyperbole buttons may also be included in records Records may be added edited searched for by string or regular expression see section Regular Expressions in the GNU Emacs Manual and inserted into the current editing buffer The rolodex Addresses menu provides access to the following commands Addresses Menu Descriptions Add Adds an entry to the rolodex Display again Redisplays matches from last search Edit Edits an existing rolodex entry Kill Removes an entry from the rolodex Order Sorts all levels in rolodex Regexp find Finds all matches for a regular expression String find Finds all matches for a string Yank Inserts first matching rolodex entry For any of these commands that prompt you for a name you may use the form parent child Chapter 2 PIEmail Operation 13 to locate a child entry below a parent entry e g from the example near the top we could give Company Manager Underling If an add request is made while in a folder message buffer the sender s name and e mail address are automatically selected as the default record to add If the default is ac
102. s to be sent in response to a message 3 A message should be forwarded to other parties and annotated before it is sent Message forms are used as templates during mail composition to support these differing needs Forms allow one to have templates for different kinds of messages one for meeting notices one for Chapter 2 PIEmail Operation 11 mailing out reports one for forwarded messages etc Each form can have any number of blank and already filled in fields but its header portion must conform to any message format standards that the message transfer agents require For example under RFC 822 the basic Internet message format standard non standard field names should be preceded with an X as in X My Field Name my field value to ensure they do not conflict with standard names Crocker82 Pm msgform forward specifies the form to use when forwarding a message Pm msgform reply gives the reply form Pm msgform mail specifies the default form to use whenever the mail com posure command is invoked with C x m With a prefix argument C u C x m one is prompted for a form to use The list of available forms is composed from a list of forms available at the site and from a personal msgform directory if the user has one Personal forms are used in preference to site forms whenever there is a form with the same name in the personal directory and the site directory 2 7 Query Operation Filters apply pre determined predicates to opene
103. sages with attributes as well as message deletion and refiling The ability to work with groups of messages at once is also desirable Composition requires editing facilities and the ability to include external information for mailing Retrieval necessitates searching over groups of messages It can also mean access to an address book to look up mailing addresses from names or vice versa A mail reader capable of personalization has further requirements Commands should be au tomatable and the system programmable to allow for personalized tailoring One should be able to filter messages and to produce custom views over a message base A number of personal mail addresses should be allowed to support a diversity of work tasks The reader s user interface should be multi modal essentially offering multiple interfaces so that it can work for people with different skill sets and adapt as those skills change over time In the following sections we describe in further detail the requirements behind the PIEmail concept 3 1 Browsing Electronic mail tools are often called mail readers indicating that their primary purpose is to display mail for viewing But the views that mail readers provide their users are often quite rigid essentially coded into the reader itself PIEmail seeks to give users better control and usage of their mail by letting them customize standard views and build their own 3 1 1 Form Usage Form support should permit the s
104. se behavior Entities may be named and thenceforth referred to by name in addition to any standard means by which they can be addressed Entities share a base protocol of common operation names add add an entity to a set copy duplicate an entity create create a new instance of an entity delete mark for deletion or actually delete link link to this entity from some source move change the location of an entity remove remove an entity from a set rename change an entity s name give it one if it has none ra 20 PIEmail Technical Report PIE Mail Too Bob Weiner 4 06 92 PersistentOb create time mod time name create delete save pm folder Q AMA E A SN pm mailmsg pm newsmsg pm mailmonitor Sq prre Hyperbole Button hbut XL E 4 3 Mailboxes The pm mailbox class provides access to mailboxes and their contents PIEmail may eventu Chapter 4 PIEmail Design 21 ally support access to mailboxes on remote machines relative to the one where it executes so encapsulation of mailbox access with a class can hide from a PIEmail client the details of whether a mailbox is local or remote Pm mailbox provides methods to determine the size of a mailbox its message count its format and to retrieve all or a portion of its messages 4 4 Folders Mailboxes are locations into which mail transfer agents deposit mail messages PIEmail like all PIE tools abstracts away from the underlyi
105. sed buttons that link to the archive holdings Users can then search and create their own links to archive entries For example sum maries of incoming messages could be stored for efficient searching each with a link to the associated message Chapter 5 Hyperbole 31 Hyperbole Concept Bob Weiner 4 06 92 activates on press Hyperbole Button hbut performs Action action applies Link View view displays You can see the simplicity of the basic Hyperbole concept and the linearity of its control flow from this diagram A press of a Smart Key see Section 5 5 1 Smart Keys page 38 over a Hyperbole button triggers the button s action which displays a view of some information artifact Keep that in mind as we explore Hyperbole s design in more detail Much of the technical complexity that we expose throughout this chapter is hidden from the user who lives in a point and click world 5 3 Button Concepts Hyperbole buttons persist across Emacs sessions so they provide a convenient means of linking from one information source to another 32 PIEmail Technical Report 5 3 1 Explicit Buttons Hyperbole creates and manages explicit buttons which look like this fake button to a Hyperbole user They are quickly recognizable yet relatively non distracting as one scans the text in which they are embedded The text between the lt and gt delimiters is called the button label Spacing between words within
106. sers can make simple changes to button types and those familiar with Emacs Lisp can quickly prototype and deliver new types A Hyperbole user works with buttons he may create modify move or delete buttons Each button performs a specific action such as display of a file or execution of a shell command 30 PIEmail Technical Report Presently there are two categories of Hyperbole buttons explicit buttons the ones that Hyper bole creates and implicit buttons buttons created and managed by other programs or embedded within the structure of a document and recognized contextually by Hyperbole Explicit Hyper bole buttons may be embedded within any type of text file or message Implicit buttons may be recognized anywhere within text also depending on the implicit button types that are available Hyperbole buttons may be clicked upon with a mouse to activate them or to describe their actions Thus a user can always check what a button will do before activating it Hyperbole does not enforce any particular hypertext or information management model but instead allows you to organize your information in large or small chunks as you see fit Some of its most important features include e Buttons may link to information or may execute procedures such as starting or communicating with external programs e Buttons may be embedded in any textual portion of electronic mail messages e Other hypertext and information retrieval systems may be enc
107. sets 4 6 Dates PIEmail should eventually have very rich time and date handling support but initially the pm date class offers simple support Internet mail message date formats Crocker82 are recognized and parsed into an internal format for comparison operations This format also normalizes times and timezones so that message times from different parts of the world may be compared Date ranges may also be supported so that actions can be scheduled to occur within a particular time window and rules can test such things as whether a mail message arrived within the first quarter of a year 4 7 Personalization Facilities 4 7 1 Task based Messaging Most mail systems associate mail addresses with user identification names in one to one cor respondence This ignores the fact that people need to manage tasks that require them to wear different hats Some task switches occur infrequently over years while others occur many times in a day or a week The latter kind are not served by a system that leaves all mail for a user in a single mailbox Task addresses are user defined slots whose names may be published so that mail on any subject sent to each address can be handled similarly Task addresses offer a dynamically configurable means of organizing mail around personal work needs since they may be freely used within rule predicates A single rule can file mail for each task into a separate folder Task addresses are created deleted and manage
108. ssification Advisor is an electronic question and answer management system that allows users to mail any question to a single address By classifying messages according to contents the system internally directs the message as best it can and thereby can tap distributed expertise Answers come back to the user from the single advisor address again hiding what amounts to an internal optimization from the user base which has no need or desire to know about it AMS also supports task based addresses In the Advisor system users who are more knowledgable and conscientious about directing their questions can send them to specific advisor subtopics by using task addresses like advisor quota AMS uses a rather than a to separate the task part of an address AMS and Messages represent years of work and testing by a number of CMU researchers They demonstrate many of the same kinds of features found in PIEmail indicating a synergy in our view on message handling needs They represent a more sophisticated environment than PIEmail overall and their goals are broader But they are large and complex Although AMS is included in the MIT X Consortium s distribution of the X Window System few sites that have this distribution have in fact set it up for use because of this complexity and the management necessary PIEmail in contrast builds on the PIE tool philosophy of being able to incrementally integrate with an existing environment It is fairly s
109. sts itself as resistance to the improvements offered by an environment This is the problem seen by DVORAK keyboard activists in a QUERTY educated world PIEs approach this problem on several fronts e PIEs permit incremental integration into a work space Rather than require people to convert wholesale to a frightening new environment PIEs permit a high level of experimentation and use of individual tools before one need choose to adopt others Thus a PIE mail tool can be used independently of a PIE calendar or database retrieval tool But the shared service nature of PIEs encourages users to expand their PIE usage as they learn that skills developed through use of one tool guide them in their use of others e PIEs encourage personalized user interface adaptation The first task in adding a new tool to an information work space is to map user interface com ponents to tool operations Many applications today allow customization such as key bindings which link key presses to application operations PIEs allow an additional higher level seman tic binding which link event types to operation types A change in such a binding affects all of the PIE programs that utilize it obviating the need to individually change bindings which have the same semantics System wide object oriented messaging which provides dynamic operation lookup makes this facility straightforward to implement e PIEs support differing skill bases and levels through multi modal
110. t version of ange ftp may always be obtained via anonymous ftp to anonymous alpha gnu ai mit edu ange ftp ange ftp el Z Once you have loaded the ange ftp package if you are on the Internet you can click on any of the following to browse the contents of the Hyperbole distribution at Brown University limit the amount you do this so as not to deny others access to the archive anonymousQwilma cs brown edu pub hyperbole anonymous0128 148 31 66 pub hyperbole This one requires setq ange ftp default user anonymous wilma cs brown edu pub hyperbole You can see that for ange ftp pathnames Hyperbole recognizes them with or without the double quote delimiters These same pathnames can be used within explicit buttons which link to files or directories GNU Info filename node references such as hypb info Glossary or emacs Glossary work similarly thanks to the Info node button type Try one of the Glossary buttons above So now when browsing the many documents that refer to filenames or Info nodes in this way you can just click on the name to see the contents If a doubly quoted string references a local pathname that does not exist within the file system it will not be considered a pathname button by Hyperbole Pathname implicit buttons provide one example of how Hyperbole can improve your working environment without you having to do any work at all Hyperbole provides a history command which returns you to pr
111. te specific button files Instead link buttons to such things should be placed at the top of your personal button file This provides a more flexible means of quick access 5 5 4 7 Buttons in Mail Hyperbole allows the embedding of buttons within electronic mail messages that are composed in Emacs with the standard mail command normally bound to C x m or with other Emacs based mail composing functions An enhanced mail reader like PIEmail can then be used to activate the buttons within messages just like any other buttons Hyperbole automatically supports the PIEmail Rmail see section Rmail in the GNU Emacs Manual VM see section Top in the VM Manual and MH e mail readers Button inclusion and activation within USENET news articles is also supported in the same fashion via the GNUS news reader see section Top in the GNUS Manual if available at your site All explicit buttons to be mailed must be created within the outgoing message buffer There is no present support for including text from other buffers or files which contain explicit buttons except for the ability to yank the contents of a message being replied to together with all of its buttons via the mail yank original command bound to C c C y From a user s perspective buttons are created in precisely the same way as in any other buffer They also appear just like any other buttons to both the message sender and the reader who uses the Hyperbole enhanced reader
112. tending the support offered to e mail users PIEmail systems include extensive automated mail handling facilities to shift messaging control from the hands of the senders to the receivers who rightly should decide how they let such com munications affect their work prioritization Only the receivers have all the information needed to make such decisions Although this idea may seem basic to some many traditional communication vehicles are not designed this way For decades telephone systems have required both immediate response and interaction with an unknown caller innovations beyond simple bulk message taking are still slow in coming Broadcast radios such as the ones police use are also similar Registered mail and package deliveries require immediate attention in the form of a signature or the items are not delivered In most of these cases the sender caller pays the service provider which provides more than enough incentive to support his needs over the receiver s Personalization is thus discouraged because the receiver does not support the market Here again we see the uniqueness of electronic mail because we can support personalization at a variety of levels regardless of who supports the delivery infrastructure typically both sender and receiver support e mail infrastructure Delivery is already automatic and once a message is delivered the recipient can fully dictate any set of workable rules to handle it 6 3 Personalization Nee
113. the marked region as the default If you accept the default and enter the rest of the information you are prompted for the button will be created within the current buffer and Hyperbole will surround the marked region with explicit button delimiters to indicate success The process becomes quite simple with a little practice If you do not mark a region before invoking the button create command you will be prompted for both a label and a source buffer for the button and the delimited label text will be inserted into the chosen buffer after a successful button creation If a previous button with the same label exists in the same buffer Hyperbole will add an instance number to the label when it adds the delimiters so that the name is unique Thus you don t have to worry about accidental button name conflicts If you want the same button to appear in multiple places within the buffer just enter the label again and delimit it yourself Hyperbole will interpret all occurrences of the same delimited label within a buffer as the same button After Hyperbole has the button label and its source buffer it will prompt you for an action type for the button Use the 7 completion key to see the available types The type selected determines any following values for which you will be prompted When creating link buttons the best technique is to place the buffer in which you want your button and the entity to link to on screen at the same time Mark the region
114. ther window link to regexp match Finds REGEXP s Nth occurrence in FILE and displays location at window top link to string match Finds STRING s Nth occurrence in FILE and displays location at window top man show Displays man page on TOPIC which may be of the form command section rfc toc Computes and displays summary of an Internet rfc in BUF NAME 5 3 3 Global Buttons Access to explicit buttons depends upon the information on your screen because you have to be able to point to a button label to activate it Sometimes it is useful to activate particular buttons without regard to the particular information with which you are presently working In such instances you use global buttons which are simply explicit buttons that may be activated or otherwise operated upon by label name If you want a permanent link to a file section that you can follow at any time you can use a global button Or what about a watch what I do macro that you use frequently Create an exec kbd macro button with an easy to type name and then you can activate it whenever the need arises 5 3 4 Implicit Buttons and Types Implicit buttons are those defined by the natural structure of a document They are identified by contextual patterns which limit the locations or states in which they can appear Their behavior is determined by one or more actions which they trigger where an action is derived from either a Hyperbole action type specification or an Emacs Lis
115. they do or to activate them When link buttons are activated they traverse their links and display the associated referents Links are typed for a number of reasons The code associated with each type need not be sent with each link or message Both sender and receiver need only a single copy of the type which can process any number of its link instances Types may be personalized to perform specially in local environments A change to the type changes the behavior of all associated links perhaps providing personalized views of information New types can be quickly prototyped and delivered for use throughout organizations Finally types can offer rule like condition action behavior whereby a button activation equates to a rule evaluation Links allow one to build up informational contexts Global buttons which can be activated by name at any time permit quick access to contexts which themselves often contain more buttons This allows one to link together various kinds of documents Available contexts then are in easy reach when browsing or composing a message Context comes in both explicit forms where a reference to another artifact is embbedded within the message and implicit forms where the receiver or an agent of his associates other artifacts with the message or conversation thread 4 8 Performance This is naturally a low priority while we are still developing the conceptual and operational framework for PIEmail But we should put some
116. through a set of messages so that the behavior will be different than if the set were pre filtered Besides random access to messages other movement facilities include movement to the first or last message within a set to the beginning or end of a message or its body forward or backward a line a page or a windowfal Expiration dates may be set on messages These dates may then be used by message processing rules or filters An expiration header is added to such messages to alert the user that messages are due to expire When the expiration date arrives or passes and an expunge is done on the folder expired messages are removed along with any deleted messages Message priorities may be set by name e g urgent or number lower ngmbers mean higher priorities Priorities can be used as a sort field when ordering messages It is common practice to delete messages after archiving or printing them Pm msg allows a user to attach other operations to any of its interactive commands So one can specify that message print operation perform a message delete after if finishes just as easily as one can set the message to expire in a week This allows for a high level of personalization at the message level 4 5 1 Message Attributes PIEmail messages have attached attributes which serve as properties that may be tested during rule or query processing and may also be inspected visually during interactive use of PIEmail The standard message view mode l
117. to add or remove Managers from a PIE to return a handle to a Manager for communication purposes and to search over the entities that a Manager controls according to some matching pattern 6 4 4 1 Agent Manager When one considers the sheer volume of information being made available electronically as international networks continue their phenomenal growth it is clear that PIEs must include an agent oriented facility that permits the specification of and asynchronous deployment of agents which pursue information management and retrieval goals An Agent Manager keeps track of agent availability activation and distribution Availability features allow other PIE pieces to make queries as to locally or remotely available agents They can then request activation of an agent with any necessary distribution parameters such as a network search space over which to limit searches e g the brown edu domain By the same token the Manager should be able to recall agents by messaging them to cease in their active duties 6 4 4 2 Context Manager Contexts provide a persistent facility for maintenance of one s working artifacts Environmental contexts allow one to easily put away a work in progress that utilizes a number of tools and then easily to restore it when work is to continue Much like the Rooms 3D Rooms work described in HeCa86 CaRoMa91 but without any specific emphasis on graphical display of contexts A Context Manager should allow one to ta
118. ts and activates a button ange ftp A non standard GNU Emacs Lisp package which allows one to use pathnames that are accessible via the Internet File Transfer Protocol ftp just like other pathnames for example when finding a file argument A button specific value fed to a Hyperbole type specification when the button is acti vated attributes Slot names associated with Hyperbole buttons An attribute value is associated with each button attribute button A selectable Hyperbole construct which performs an action A button consists of a set of attributes that includes a textual label a category a type and zero or more 46 PIEmail Technical Report arguments Explicit buttons also have creator create time last modifier and last modifier time attributes Buttons provide the user s gateway to information The user sees and interacts with button labels the rest of the button data is managed invisibly by Hyperbole and displayed only in response to user queries button activation See activation button attributes See attributes button data Lists of button attribute values explicitly saved and managed by Hyperbole One list for each button created by Hyperbole button file local A per directory file named HYPB that may be used to store any desired buttons and may then be displayed via a menu selection whenever a user is within that directory button file personal A per user file named HYPB that may be used to store
119. uation context predicate and actions A number of predicates and actions will be standard with PIEmail so that they are quite easy to specify As an example suppose Brent is involved in the Akers Open race upcoming in two weeks and he wants to file messages concerning that race into a folder named Open The appropriate rule could be generated from a form filled out as follows Chapter 4 PIEmail Design 27 M AAA o rms Rule akers open From To Brent runner CC Subject Akers Open Date Today 2 weeks Body Action file to Open o ee ee eee e mm A programmatic encoding of the same rule would be pm rule akers open task runner and pm hdr string subject Akers Open pn date less than pm date today 14 pm msg file to Open 4 7 3 Views Views are a pervasive means of information display within PIEmail The use of a view over an information base rather than a fixed display format allows one to customize both display contents and display formats throughout PIEmail PIEmail views forms filters and sorters are closely related Forms specify display layouts and formatting for a set of fields Filters produce subsets from collections of information keeping only those entities that match filter specifications
120. uld give a personally generated address to a working group he needs to correspond with to help ensure that all mail from the group regardless of subject is processed the same way i On the other hand we don t want users to be able to impersonate one another or to acquire privledges that they should not have So we must limit the form of a personalized address to something that still identifies the party whose address it is 3 2 5 Automation User level commands should be automatable A common failing of the easier to use graphical environments of today is that there is seldom a way to automate the functions that they offer For testing and oft repeated operations one then has no choice but to interact with the programs and their required tedium PIEmail should offer a support structure for automating commands and a programming library for extending its functionality PIEmail must offer a means of pre processing messages before they are read to allow pre categorization or even deletion or forwarding 3 3 Composition 3 3 1 Editing Editing is fundamental to effective information creation PIEmail is built within the GNU Emacs editor because of its strong base of editing operations and its platform portability Emacs editing operations such as how to search through texts and how to include a file s contents into a buffer should be available and natural to use within PIEmail 3 3 2 Hyperlinking Hyperlinks should be available so that
121. utton s delimiters are removed to confirm the delete Presently there is no way to recover a deleted button it must be recreated but this will be remedied in the future 5 5 4 4 Modification Ebut Modify prompts you with each of the elements from the button s data list and allows you to modify each in turn 5 5 4 5 Location The Ebut Help menu can be used to summarize all of the explicit buttons within a single buffer The buttons may then be activated directly from the summary Ebut Search prompts for a search pattern and searches across all the locations in which you have previously created explicit buttons It asks you whether to match to any part of a button label or only complete labels It then displays a list of button matches with a single line of surrounding context from their sources Any button in the match list may be activated as usual A Smart Key press on the surrounding context jumps to the associated source line or a press on the filename preceding the matches jumps to the file without selecting a particular line There are presently no user level facilities for globally locating buttons created by others or for searching on particular button attributes 5 5 4 6 Button Files It is often convenient to create lists of buttons that can be used as menus that offer centralized access to distributed information pools These files can serve as useful roadmaps to help efficiently guide a user through both unfamiliar and highly famil
122. vely use C h h q or C g will quit from the menu without invoking any commands if you just want to take a look A menu item is selected by pressing the Smart Key over it or by typing its first letter in upper or lower case A click of the secondary Smart Key on a menu item gives help on it A click of the same key within this paragraph when a Hyperbole menu is not displayed pops up a summary of all the things the Smart Keys can do Try it C 3 Explicit Button Samples If your lt Info directory list gt or lt Info directory gt variables include the directory that contains the online GNU Emacs manual activation of the next button will tell you about lt keyboard macros gt Can t remember a Hyperbole term Check out the Hyperbole Manual lt glossary gt Here is a lt keyboard macro gt button that shows documentation for the first parenthesis delim ited Emacs Lisp function that follows it e g hbut report You can see that a button label can consist of a number of words up to a set lt maximum length gt A lt shell command gt button can do many things such as display the length of this file While such commands are executing you can perform other operations If you create a button that runs a shell command which displays its own window use exec window cmd rather than exec shell cmd as its action type You can link to files such as your lt login gt file Or directories like the lt tmp directory gt
123. want any message at all add the following to your emacs file before the point at which you load Hyperbole setq smail comment nil A final mail related facility provided by Hyperbole is the ability to save a pointer to a received mail message by creating an explicit button with a link to mail action type When prompted for the mail message to link to if you press the Smart Key on a message the appropriate parameter will be copied to the argument prompt as described in Section 5 5 3 Entering Arguments page 41 Chapter 5 Hyperbole 45 5 5 4 8 Buttons in News Explicit buttons may be embedded within outgoing USENET news articles and may be activated from news articles that are being read This support is available for the GNUS news reader All Hyperbole support should work just as it does when reading or sending mail See Sec tion 5 5 4 7 Buttons in Mail page 44 When reading news buttons which appear in message Subject lines may be activated within the GNUS subject buffer as well as the article buffer When posting news the post news buffer is used for outgoing news articles rather than the mail buffer Remember that the articles you post do not contain the action type definitions used by the buttons so the receiver must have these or she will receive an error when he activates the buttons You should also keep in mind that most USENET readers will not be using Hyperbole so if they receive a news article containing expl
124. when used to perform mail filtering could bring non programmers up to the level of programmers who had to write filtering instructions procedurally They further found that the programmers were faster than the non programmers when using the forms based interface This coupled with success seen in Information Lens use suggests that forms based queries and rule generation will work well for a diversity of users WiWhGoJo83 report on an experiment that suggests that tailoring an e mail reader user interface through repeated user feedback yields a much more effective interface This idea is the reason for our strong emphasis on personalization The Consul CUE KaMaSo83 system points to the effectiveness of multi modal interfaces where users have a choice of interaction mechanisms for each possible command Some argue that such user interfaces are confusing since users have trouble deciding which techniques to choose Our anectdotal experience observing people using our systems over the last year suggests the opposite however People either have prior knowledge about what interaction techniques they prefer or they quickly settle on those with which they can be comfortable Multi modal interfaces afford usability to a broader class of users If one s interaction style changes e g a mouse becomes unusable due to limited arm movement one can switch to one of Chapter 7 Prior Work 61 the other available input devices Personalized environments shou
125. which the button is attached Most functions utilize the pre defined hbut current symbol by default to store and retrieve the last encountered button in edit format The hbdata class handles the terse stored format The hbut ebut gbut and ibut classes work with the name value format This separation permits the wholesale replacement of the storage manager with another with any interface changes hidden from any Hyperbole client programming 5 3 7 Programmatic Button Creation A common need when developing with Hyperbole is the ability to create or modify explicit buttons without user interaction For example an application might require the addition of an explicit summary button to a file for each new mail message a user reads that contains a set of keywords The user could then check the summary file and jump to desired messages quickly The Hyperbole ebut class supports programmatic access to explicit buttons The documentation for ebut create explains the set of attributes settings necessary to create an explicit button For operations over the whole set of buttons within the visible non narrowed portion of a buffer use the ebut map function 5 4 Button and Type Precedences Explicit buttons always take precedence over implicit buttons Thus if a button selection is made which falls within both an explicit and implicit button only the explicit button will be selected Explicit button labels are not allowed to overlap Hyperbole s be
126. y Hyperbole By default explicit buttons are delimited like this fake button Direct selection is used to operate upon an explicit button global button A form of explicit button which is typically accessed by name rather than direct selec tion Global buttons are useful when one wants quick access to actions such as jumping Chapter 5 Hyperbole 47 to common file locations or for performing sequences of operations One need not locate them since they are always available by name with full completion offered All global buttons are stored in the file given by the variable gbut file and may be activated as regular explicit buttons by visiting this file By default this is the same as the user s personal button file global button file See button file personal hook variable Hyperbole A variable that permits customization of an existing function s operation without the need to edit the function s code See also the documentation for the function run hooks A flexible programmable information management and viewing system built on top of GNU Emacs It utilizes a button action model and supports hypertextual linkages Hyperbole is all things to all people Hyperbole environment hypertext A programmatic context within which Hyperbole operates This includes the set of Hyperbole types defined and the set of Hyperbole code modules loaded It does not in clude the set of accessible buttons Although the entire Emacs env
127. y buf src Button Attribute hattr label p filename string attributes obj symbol clear hbut copy from hbut to hbut get obj symbol attr symbol list obj symbol memq attr symbol obj symbol report attrib list save set obj sym attr sym attr val label regexp key list amp opt file loc p map but func modity amp opt key sym search string out buf optional action Global Button gbut file filename 0 Action action EE d Process Messenger pmsg PIEmail Technical Report Bob Weiner 4 06 92 AE delete label p label set label optional start end categ LN Hyperbole Type htype doc string name symbol parent symbol create type parent doc property list doc htype sym delete type parent names htype sym amp optional sym LN AA Gp c AA A cer cmn qiu SESS Implicit Button Type ibtype create type params doc at p amp optional to p style Elisp Evaluator eval Link View Version orig last num src formatted text idx act label help label delete type p label A Hyperbole Link hlink Process Starter pstart aaa a Pee A ES AA referent ZER ALL VIEW WORK IS IN PROGRESS Node c Link View Iview eval AAA Node Types include Node Group Composite Node Link View Type Link View Target Text File es Graphics File EA window screen File Directory AAA DN Link Outline View Link Positional View Link Regional View Link Sectiona

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