MyLife has been designed around the principles of simplicity and efficiency. It was our goal to create a program which allowed you, the user, to easily store and retrieve all of the information which you consider to be useful. Below is an overview of the layout and content within MyLife.

When you load up MyLife for the first time you are greeted with the user interface displayed in the figure below. The user interface consists of three important items :

• The Menu Panel
• The List Panel
• The Content Panel

The Menu Panel's major role is to help you navigate through all of the information stored within MyLife. It consists of three tables; the Person table allows you to choose whose information you want to look at. The Category and Sub Category table's allow you to refine your search for information on that person. It is important to realize that MyLife populates the Person table with people in your Address Book (a program included with every version of Mac OS X). If you are having problems adding a person into Address Book or getting the Person table to populate please read the FAQ page.

Once a Person, Category and Sub Category have been selected in the Menu Panel, the List Panel becomes available. The List Panel allows you to add and remove items (to the selected Person in the selected Sub Category). It also allows you to add references to other peoples items; for more information on references please see Links & References.

After an item has been selected from the List Panel the Content Panel becomes available. The Content Panel is the location where you enter specific information for a given item. It allows you to store various types of textual information much like any database would. However, it also allows you to store documents (please see Documents) as well as links (please see Links & References) to other items.

So far, MyLife's three major user interface items have been described : the Menu Panel, List Panel & Content Panel. The figure below shows you where these items fit into the user interface and explains some of the key components within each.

[1] The Content Panel (described above)

[2] The Menu Panel (described above)

[3] The List Panel (described above)

[4] A group of buttons which (from top to bottom) allow you to add an item, add a reference and remove the selected item.

[5] A group of buttons which allow you to navigate the list of items displayed in the List Panel. They allow you to select the first item, previous item, next item or last item.

[6] A group of controls which allows you to determine how the items in the List Panel are sorted. The items are sorted according to the selected attribute in the popup box (in either ascending or descending order).

[7] Two buttons which (from top to bottom) allow you to add a document, and remove the selected document.

[8] Two buttons which allow you to navigate the list of documents.

[9] Two buttons which (from top to bottom) allow you to add a link and remove the selected link.

[10] Two buttons which allow you to navigate the list of links.

[11] This control allows you filter out the list of people shown in the Person table. For example, by typing 'John' into this control you would only be able to see people who had 'John' as part of their name.