GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Chandler UI Ideas

I haven't the time to keep up with the Chandler mailing lists. I skim them sometimes, using GMANE and a good (MT-NewsWatcher, on the Mac) or an almost-acceptable (Gravity, on a PC) newsreader.

But two things strike me about many of the ideas being tossed around in the Chandler design list:

They are oriented towards tiny monitors. I mean, like, 17 inch or less. Absurdly small for a desktop machine. This shows up in most Windows apps, too — so many widgets, toolbars, and crap wedged onto a single frame, as if frames were some precious, scarce commodity that have to contain everything about an app. Boy, do I miss the dual-monitor setups I had at Sun and at Apple.
We know how to resize windows. But sub-windows, toolbars, buttons that don't look like buttons, and all those other gew-gaws just confuse things. One of the features I liked best about Eudora and about MT-NewsWatcher was their cleanly-designed, multi-windowed interfaces.
They are oriented towards low volumes. Small example: threading. People keep presenting "threading by References headers" versus "threading by Subject" as if they are mutually exclusive choices. HEY! If it's a high-volume newsgroup, I want you to collapse together threads wherever it's reasonable. Use both of these kinds of threads to help merge threads. And make the subject match loose (e.g., if they match for the 1st 30 chars or so).
For high-volume mailing lists and newsgroups, we need an interface that lets me easily pick out the few threads I'm interested in seeing, and make all the rest just Go Away. See some of MT-NewsWatcher's per-newsgroup options for a nice way to do this.

And by the way, congrats to David McCusker for his timing. Getting rehired in less than six months after a layoff is not common these days, AFAICT. And working on Chandler sure sounds cool.
10:43:04 PM comment/