i2Brain: Aspects

What is an "aspect"?

Examples:

	in a project concerned with movies, examples of aspects could be "Director", "Distributor" or "Release year".
	In the example about "Estate agents", the aspects "City", "Size" and "Price" are used.

Choosing the right aspects for your information is an important step when using i2Brain. The examples give you a taste for the possibilities.

Everything in real life has a number of aspects:

	physical objects have color, weight, price etc.
	activities have a start-time, duration, priority, a state

See "Defining aspects" for more on how to "find" the aspects in your information.

"Values" of an aspect

All of these aspects have "values".

	The "state" of an activity could have the following values: planned, in progress, finished, tested.
	A priority often has a numerical value between 1 and 5.

Whenever you find that your data can have a number of different values (but ONLY ONE of them!), you have found an "aspect". It is worth finding a succinct name for it, so you will have no trouble understanding your information later. (Don't worry if you can't find the ideal name to start with - you can change or even delete it later.) An aspect can have as many values as you need.

Be creative. i2Brain is there to increase your creativity. Get going and try it out!

Use:

In the toolbar click or in the menu choose "Aspects | New aspect". Type the name of the aspect, e.g. "Tel.", "Director", "City", "Price" or whatever you want.

The name of an aspect should be kept short so the items are easy to read. Their names are limited to 20 characters.

The list of aspects you have already created is shown for your information in the list on the left.

If you want a column view to be created straight away with this new aspect defining its columns, check the top box. (You can create one later using the main window's "View | New column view...".)

Mark the "Calls external program?" box if the information you are going to enter for this aspect will be used to call another program, open a website or a document in your favourite word-processor. See here for details about calling external programs.

You can only edit the "Prefix" box if "calls external program" is checked. Enter "callto:" if this aspect is always going to contain a telephone number. This saves you having to type "callto:" every time you type a telephone number into an element. ("callto:" is a special protocol used to activate telephones, TAPI devices, Skype™ etc.) "mailto:" is another protocol; it ensures your email program creates a new email.

You can read more about aspects here.

Editing an item after adding aspects

Use the TAB key to move the cursor from one input field to the next, and Shift-TAB to move back again. You also reach the description panel with the TAB key.

As you learnt when you were introduced to Items, double clicking an item or a view's background opens an item. In fact, the double-click opens it so that all its aspects can be edited. If you only want to change the item's name, but none of its other aspects, choose "Edit name" in the item's context menu.

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