Heikki Toivonen wrote:
This seems like mischaracterization of why things are the way they are and where we are planning to go with email. Doing full featured email client is a lot of work, and we simply have not done the work (yet?) to become one. It would not take a huge amount of work to become usable email client for casual email users (say 0-10 emails a day with no spam to speak of). I very strongly believe that email must be a core area of any serious PIM, or it is not interoperable nor integrated. What we have now feels like a terrible kludge to me.
Casual email users aren't really our target though. 1-10 emails a day -- these folks are unlikely to choose a desktop app over gmail, yahoo, etc. We're trying to solve a problem for people who get too much email, who messily manage their lives in email.
I agree that the optimal solution for this problem would involve a fully integrated email client, and the *full vision* of Chandler involves it growing into more complete email features. Email is one of the motivations for proceeding with the rearchitecture project.
That said, imho replacement-for-existing-email-client is not on our first step to adoption. Even aside from the cost of implementation (in time and $$), it requires a *big* investment for end users to replace their email client. We need to be popular and proven for people to overcome that barrier and adopt Chandler for email. Mimi's argument is that we should remove the mental overhead of email in the UI while the product is at the stage of not supporting full email functionality.
We've made email a centerpiece of the UI to suggest the "plausible promise" of what Chandler will grow into. What we're hearing from potential users is that the "plausible promise" is overwhelming and intimidating. We need to focus on what Chandler can do for these users *today* and make that shine. We need to make that simpler thing popular, and grow into the fuller vision over time.
Cheers, Katie _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
