Anybody using these? In 4 years of using Legend I have yet to find a meaningful/workable use case.
Usually what wrecks things for me is that you can either view all Archive items or all non-Archive items, but not both together. Yet you Archive individual items in an outline. So when you view those archived items, they’re completely out of the context of the Outline they were archived from. I can’t find any way to get value from that. At least, nothing that I can’t already do with filters.
What Archiving does seem to be useful for is losing the heck out of items. I just “found” a HUGE raft of items in one of my documents because I accidentally opened an Archive Pane pointed to it. Maybe these are leftover from a previous iteration of my ‘system’…I dunno but I have to go through them now.
Trouble is that when you archive items, they just disappear. No indication that they are in that document anywhere. That’s really risky! What if you decide to move all the contents of one document into another one, then delete the old one, forgetting it had archived items in it? I know I’ve done that kind of move before, during a “restructuring”.
One thing I DO find myself wanting is a way to review old documents full of ‘completed’ items – without squinting at pages and pages of dim text. SO, I was thinking, what if Archive Panes worked more like a “completed viewer”? Have the Archive Pane simply be a way to view completes and incompletes in their original Outline structure – all in a readable color. Maybe this would just mean changing the font ‘completes’ display in, so it’s the same as incompletes (but leave the grey bar to the left to indicate status)? Or maybe give them a distinct – but not “dim”– color? This would be quite useful to me and I’d probably end up adding an Archive Pane the end of several existing Boards. It might be better to name them differently in this case.
Also, instead of archiving individual items, how about switching the “archive” command so it applies to whole documents instead of separate items? I’d love to have an “Archive” area in my Documents list where I could send Docs from fully completed projects. Bonus points if I could somehow Archive the Board that points to that document, too. That way I need not keep old boards and docs cluttering my Board Bar and Docs list, but with a single click I can jump right back into that Project and work with it (or use it as a template to create my next project’s doc+board). In fact, maybe that’s really what “Archiving” should be – making a “bundle” of docs+boards that stays together. This seems like it would play really well with templates and especially collaboration.
