November 23, 2004
MarkBernstein.org
 

Tuning

I spent of the day optimizing the new Tinderbox rule system -- a system that lets you add constraints to say things like:

Any project is urgent if any of the tasks it contains is urgent, or if you've said that it's urgent.

Tuning
The catch is, I expect rules will be so attractive that people will want to use them all over the place. Can they be fast enough? Remember, a modest ToDo list might contain, say, 402 tasks -- each of which might inherit a rule from the archetypical task prototype. So now we've got to update 402 rules, all the time.

The answer's still far from clear. But at breakfast, the test case ran in 329 msec, and by dinner we were down to 79 msec. Better.

Along the way, I started an experiment in using colors in outline views. If an outline item is colored, does it use Color (the base color of the note in the map) or NameColor (the color of the note's title in the map) or something else?