On Tuesday 11 January 2000 Jason Thompson wrote:
> Usenet, on the other hand...Well, I know none of the technical aspects
> of Usenet,
Even programmers have assumed that they are technically closer than
they are. The PINE team even used the same underlying code as the
email half of the program to manipulate news articles. Unfortunately
there *are* subtle but very important differences between the two, and
the standard advice to programmers about to implement a newsreader is
to stop, read the standard RFCs (822, 977, 1036), read Son-of-RFC1036
<URL:ftp://ftp.zoo.toronto.edu/pub/news.txt.Z>, read the whole of The
Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval
<URL:http://www.newsreaders.com/gnksa/>, but in particular
<URL:http://www.xs4all.nl/~js/gnksa/read-before.txt> and after all
that if you still think writing a newsreader is a good idea, *please*
get it right! ;-)
> but I've seen that MS Outlook smoothly integrates news and
> mail into one client. I've always liked Outlook for that,
That's always irritated me slightly. I occasionally use Outlook for
reading news. I use The Bat! exclusively for reading email. Outlook
seems to insist on regularly asking me whether I want to add a new
email/POP account within it. NO! I use The Bat! for email! You are not
my email client so SHUT UP! And although I can delete just about
every folder in Outlook's folder tree, I can't completely delete the
Inbox. It just won't let me.
Note that in principal I have nothing against a package which combines
email and news reading facilities. It's just that in practice every
one I've seen has been sufficiently deficient for me not to be able to
stand using it.
So in principal, I'm not dead set against The Bat! V2 gaining
news-reading abilities. However, I would have one very big wish of it:
Like I say, I use separate clients for reading mail and news. Two
different UIs (even if occasionally one of them is a combined client,
I *never* read email in it.) I read mail and news at different times,
as two different activities. My attitude to reading messages and
articles is different. And news isn't just like a mailing list either.
It's not even like a big group of mailing lists.
Basically, what I'd really like for this combined client Bat is for
me, via a command-line switch, to be able to tell it to be either a
dedicated email client, or a dedicated newsreader. When I've told it
to be an email client, all aspects of newsreading would be hidden from
the UI, there would be no newsgroups folder. When I tell it to be a
newsreader the reverse occurs: no Inbox, no Trash, all Message options
hidden from the UI.
When in email mode I don't even want to know that it's capable of
being a newsreader and vice versa. Now there is a limit to how far you
can take this strategy in a combined client: there are precisely two
exceptions as I see it:
i) a good newsreader must have a Reply by Mail
command. This should be integrated with the email account structure in
a combined client, even if the regular emailing UI is not visible.
ii) I occasionally have need to approve news postings on a private moderated
newsgroup. Since these arrive via mail, it would be nice to be able to
inject them into the news system directly rather than cut'n'paste into
a separate newsreader.
But these are relatively rare occurences (compared to the volume of
pure email or pure news I read), and so in general my point stants:
When reading in one mode (mail/news) I would rather not have the other
mode constantly pushed in my face by a combined UI, even if the
underlying program does just happen to be the same.
> Well, you're right on that point. I can see how you would be concerned.
> Let's just hope that TB v2.0 meets everyone's standards, preferably
> exceed them.
I'll drink to that!
John
--
you gave me something that i could touch in a world where i'd had too much
something i could feel with my broken hands full of lost ideals but soon i'm
returning to you my friend and we'll go where the rivers end in the silver sea
and i'll carry you if you carry me
--
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