Badges
Another fresh Tinderbox experiment went out to the testers today. Here, we add badges — small icons — to notes in the map and outline view.
Each badge has a name. Agents and actions can easily set the badge for a note, so you can use badges to highlight especially significant or urgent notes, or simply to reflect what kind of note each item happens to be.
An interesting tension in supporting badges is that the vocabulary of badges needs to be sufficiently rich to express what you want to say (and to look as you'd like things to look), but not so vast that you can't find the badge you want to use. Another tension, inevitably, is the contest between symbolic and realistic drawing, and between big badges (which look better) and small ones (which are less disruptive).
