The guideLists
Lists
The arrangement. Some you make, some arrive already made.
A list is a small set of things, in an order you chose, with a name that says something. Lists in Kyurations form two ways: you make one, or the product notices that a group of things in your Bower belong together, names it, and offers it to you as a draft. A draft is a suggestion until you sign it, at which point it is yours.
What a list is for
A list is not a folder and it is not a tag. A folder is where a thing lives, and a tag is what a thing is about. A list is an argument: these nine things, in this order, under this name.
That is why the same item can sit in several lists without being copied, and why a list called Reading is not a collection while a list called Things that changed how I write is.
Lists that form themselves
Most people never get around to arranging what they save. So the product does a first pass. When enough related things accumulate, they are grouped, given a name, and offered as a draft list.
Grouping is by meaning rather than by matching tag strings, which is what stops you ending up with three near-identical lists for one subject. Press Organize to run it again over everything currently in your Bower.
- Organize my BowerShiftO
Signing a draft
A draft is rendered faintly, held back from the others, because it is a hypothesis and not yet your work. It carries one affordance: Sign to claim.
Signing is the moment a machine's guess becomes a person's collection. Before it, nobody has vouched for the grouping. After it, you have, and the list behaves like any list you made yourself. A draft you do not want is dismissed and does not come back.
- Sign a draftShiftS
Building one by hand
New list, name it, add things. Inside a list, both Add buttons open a picker of what you have already saved, because a list is made out of your Bower rather than out of the open web. Capture lives on the Bower; arrangement lives here.
The picker doubles as a create surface, so if the list you want does not exist yet you can make it without backing out first.
- New listN
- Add itemsA
- RenameE
- DuplicateD
- Delete listBackspaceorDel
Adding to the right list
When something is proposed for a list, it is judged against what that list is actually about rather than against every item that happens to be in it. A list of nine essays on typography with one stray link about coffee is still a list about typography, and admission is decided on the nine.
An item in two lists is one item. Edit its note in one place and the other list shows the same note, because there is no copy.
What a list carries
- A name and a description, both editable in place.
- A cover, taken from what is inside it, and a colour derived from that cover.
- Its own tags, which are the tags of the things in it.
- A visibility: private, public, or reachable with a link and a password.
- Optionally a price, and optionally a newsletter.
Questions
- Does putting something in a list take it out of my Bower?
- No. The Bower holds everything, always. A list is a view onto some of it, and the same item can be in as many lists as it belongs in.
- What happens to a draft I ignore?
- It sits there, faint, until you sign it or dismiss it. It is not published, not counted as yours, and not shown to anybody else.
- Can I reorder a list?
- Yes, and the order is part of the argument. The same twelve links in a different order say a different thing.