Mikael; I certainly agree that newcomers should be amply catered for; they are the lifeblood of any small developer. However, this is POWERmail... and having a greater degree of sophistication available for those who want it would seem to go along with the name, and cannot be a bad thing provided the GUI is sensibly and well implemented.
I do agree that your argument about the message browser being for listing messages in *definite* locations has a certain logic to it. But I am not convinced that it outweighs (for me) the usability factor. By your argument there is no place in the browser for any sort of 'smart' folder (which would surely operate in the same way as the recent mail window, displaying messages from disparate locations according to specified criteria), and smart folders are something that I would love to see implemented in PM -- they would do away with many of my recurring gripes in one fell swoop. The problem for me is one of screen real estate. I want to have both the browser and recent mail windows showing at the same time because I'm always looking at one or the other, and because I want to have several columns showing in each, they inevitably overlap each other all the time. If I put both windows side by side, even without showing all of the columns that I want to refer to, they take up the whole width of my monitor -- and that's a 23" cinema display. Constantly having to bring one or the other to the foreground is a bit annoying, and to keep closing one and reopening it would be even more so. Really, though, I think that it comes down to the fact that I really want all my email activity to take place in one window, not two, just for visual neatness. I'm aware that that is a personal taste thing, but visual neatness is a hallmark of PM and this would not, IMO, be out of keeping with that. The ideal, for me, would be to have the ability to set up smart folders in the browser -- which would effectively do away with the need for the RMW. Off the top of my head, I would simply reserve a section of the folder list for Smart Folders, in between the In/Out Trays and the 'regular' folders. Rick -- G5 2GHz x2 :: 2GB RAM :: 10.4.5 :: PM 5.2.3 :: 3 pane mode Shark Attack: A Design Studio <www.sharkattack.co.uk> -- Original message: Received from Mikael Byström on 21/3/06 at 10:11 >This doesn't make much sense actually. What's the gain? The Recent Mail >window is one button press action away. It's an overview of what recent >messages there are in in the browsers database. These are not part of the >mail DB in that location. To not clearly put these somewhere else other >than in the browser would be confusing for many, especially newcomers. > >CTM should design for newcomers, many newcomers. We need them.
