Hi, I checked out the recording of the conference. All pretty good stuff, and here's to PulseData for managing to pull it off and make it sound and work as well as they did. My only reasons for not contributing were related to the software - it seems to be an ActiveX control and I have a strict policy on ActiveX controls. I wanted to present my comments on it here, as a lesser substitute for being present and adlibbing at the appropriate moments.
First of all, the query someone made about Microshaft LookOut synchronisation, as well as a few other spots in the conference, highlighted the issue of inovation through intuitive interfaces. I want to point out once again my strong belief that yes, BrailleNote achieves well for its audience by being intuitive and menu-oriented as it is, but that no, such intuitiveness must not excuse the software's inability to perform as do mainstream PDAs. So, yes, not looking like LookOut is a good touch, but only if BrailleNote is capable of all of LookOut's features, or the equivalent "Inbox" application (which, to be honest, is not far off). Not adding the ability to access advanced or complicated functionality is almost, in my opinion, like censorship, in the sense that you are the official declarators of exactly what the device does and does not do. As I have also said, expanding QA inspection to the public, open source, public beta cycles, smaller intervals between releases and of course the SDK will also help the situation. Secondly, Thomas, no topics are defined for this list. This is why you can't control the topics you are subscribed to. In Mailman and to varying degrees in other list server software, a topic is a string that further separates list traffic that can appear in the list posts for a given mailing list. Note that this is a different idea to so-called subordinate or sub lists, which is the use of one mailing list to distribute to another mailing list as part of its membership in one direction. Mailman lets you specify the topic strings, and it is then the responsibility of the list members to label their mail appropriately using, say, the subject line, so that the mail is correctly categorised. If topics are on, subscribers can choose which topics they want or whether they want all of them, and in the case that they do not, whether messages not covered by their selected topics should be distributed to them or not. The idea is that if announcements were sent to the list with the term "[announce]" in the Subject line, then people who just wanted announcement traffic could subscribe to the braillenote list under the one topic "[announce]". Or, perhaps, if non-English speakers exist on-list, they could be assigned topics to which they only would subscribe. It's generally good practice to keep the number of cross-postings to the absolute lowest possible. This helps in processing mail, apart from being better for netiquette. So, for instance, you could subscribe the announce list to the BrailleNote list, and then only send to the announce address with announcements - now, there is no possibility of BrailleNote list members missing announcements due to filtering into folders based on recipient address or other list-identification header where not desired and you only make one copy of the message when sending. Cheers, Sabahattin -- If an email tells you to forward it to all your friends, please temporarily forget that I am your friend. Sabahattin Gucukoglu Phone: +44 20 88008915 Mobile: +44 7986 053399 http://www.sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/ Email/MSN: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Skype: SabahattinGucukoglu (requires authorisation, add me to your list first) SpeakFreely: sabahattin-gucukoglu.com (Please use CELP compression if your processor allows)
