Bruno, Tuesday, February 4, 2003, 6:06:53 AM, you wrote: >> ... and TB handles MIME digests very well indeed. Open any one of >> the attached messages and TB opens a virtual folder containing *all* >> of them.
BF> How is that handling "very well?" Maybe for you. and me. i find TB's virtual folder construct excellent and particularly like the fact that it is used for more than one purpose in the product. (It probably helps that a group of us came up with a similar construct for a startup company six years ago. It probably also helps that I very much like designs that re-use familiar user constructs.) BF> I believe one of the BF> points made in the beginning was that TB treated all MIME parts as BF> attachments, even when they were not. What are the other bits of MIME body-parts, if they are not "attachments"? I do not understand how some are attachments and some are not. What does this mean? BF> The messages in a MIME digest aren't attachments. the digest, itself, is. or, at least, it is on an equal logical level as other bits of mime body-parts. MIME does not do a good job of distinguishing body-parts that are an inline part of the main message, versus body-parts that are external (and should be handled separately.) It is designed as a uniform hierarchy. This makes it difficult to know where logical boundaries are. BF> Again, the above is surely all a matter of opinion. Not just opinion. User interface design "usability" has an empirical component. Better vs. worse designs affect usability in measurable ways. So this sort of discussion should include some attempts to describe how one approach is more "usable" for more users. BF> So I say that TB BF> accepts MIME messages, however its treatment of such messages does not BF> conform to the wishes of all its users Unfortunately UI design benefits are, at best, statistical. There is not such thing as a user interface that conforms to the wishes of all users. BF> In the preview pane I'd like to see the whole digest for instance, with BF> each message separated by a visual marker of some sort. For long messages, that means you would have a viewer pane that scrolls forever. How is this a good thing? BF> Look at Agent BF> to see how this is handled very cleanly if you mean <http://www.forteinc.com/agent>, then the screen shot they offer looks pretty similar to TB. How does it differ? BF> - it also does the bursting. By "bursting", do you mean opening subordinate sets of messages within the main viewer pane, rather than opening a new window with a virtual folder pane and separate pane for viewing individual message contents in? BF> TB could just as easily show all the messages within the preview BF> pane one after the other Having separate MIME body-parts available through separate tabs, at the bottom of the contents viewer pane, works pretty well for me. d/ -- Dave <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com> t +1.408.246.8253; f +1.408.850.1850 ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
