Tony, [T] wrote: > Add fat graphics, animated stuff, and useless gadgets. IMO TB! made > it's 1st step in that direction with the new icons and promise of > skins.
<soapbox> You know, I find this interesting. The very common negative commentary about new icons and smilies with improved XP look support is just testimony to how these things are noticed, whether it be positively or negatively. The applications appearance is the first thing that greets the user. Putting reliability and robust functionality aside as being a must, an attractive interface adds a lot to an application that requires day to day user interaction. IOW's, if I had two applications with equal functionality, reliability and ease of use, I'd personally go for the one that I found more pleasant to look at. It's not a waste of time and development to spend a while focusing on improving the applications appearance. Furthermore, it's not usually the cause of unreliability creeping in, neither does it contribute much to bloating the software. What has made TB! difficult to tame in terms of reliability and bugs are not the introduction of smilies and the efforts at improving the applications appearance as is so commonly mentioned, since it seems to be popular to do so like promoting Linux. ;) - A completely reworked view column modes setup/interface introduced a lot of bugs for a while. - The continuing effort at offering Full IMAP support in what originally was a sophisticated POP3 client has offered serious challenges in maintaining reliability and keeping the bugs out. Not to mention the overall size of the application. There are clients like ThunderBird and Mulberry who focus only on IMAP since it's work enough in itself to fully implement. - A completely reworked filtering system has added its own problems while being ironed out. - A scheduler was added - Chat support was added - The plug-in interfaces were added. - Reworking of the macro support was done - Don't forget the addition of alternative editors I'm sure there's more. It's these major additions/enhancements that have made TB!'s executable that much larger, that much harder to maintain it's reliability and to keep the bugs out. Perhaps these major features could have been introduced more gradually? A more reliable approach perhaps? That makes for a sound argument. But please, I'm personally really getting tired of the comments about smilies and new icons as if they comprise a HUGE coding effort that could have been channeled elsewhere, or that they comprise a significant source of buggy behaviour and bloat in TB!. </soapbox> -- -= Allie =- The Bat!� v3.0 � Windows XP Pro (Service Pack 2) ..... Drive A: format failure, formatting C: instead... ________________________________________________ Current version is 3.00.00 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
