On 2 Dec 2015, at 0:15, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

There's a chance, but I haven't done any work on it yet (and it's a major change/feature).

The reason that this occurred to me is that I was reading a detailed review of Macintosh mail applications where MailMate was declared "The Best Third-Party Email Client for Power Users," which in this case was sort of the bronze medal, since a couple of other apps were recommended for normal people:

http://thesweetsetup.com/apps/favorite-email-client-os-x/

The review at one point says, "The interface is very functional, but also pretty boring. If looks are important to you, you won’t like MailMate."

I decided to take a close look at the two apps also reviewed as well as the Apple Mail app to see exactly how they were considered better designed. And in the end I think it's 80 percent the fact that the designers were not constricted by the spreadsheet limitation in the mail list. If users could do a sort of CSS style spec in designing that, they could duplicate most of the different things these other apps are doing. It might also help to add the ability to change a few things like white space (margins, leading) and font and icon stuff in the other panels, but it's mostly that mail list panel.

So it seems to me that you could do away with "functional, but boring" reviews by liberalizing the degree to which customization could be done. At that point people would have the tools to mimic whatever design they like. Or switch among designs weekly. MailMate could become the mail application for people for whom "looks are important," so important that they want to do it themselves or choose among several well-designed variations.
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