There are a lot of ideas flying around the list about how power users want such and such feature, and users don't care about blah blah, and the default needs to be so and so. But we each have our own ideas about who these users are and what they want. I don't think we have decided who Letters is for.
Who is the target audience of Letters? To answer that, I propose an experiment: Let's invent some fictional users, whose needs and habits should be satisfied by Letters 1.0. In feature discussions, we can use them as litmus tests (Would our users like this feature?). That may prove more useful and more decisive than our mob of opinions. - The goal: We will know who these "power users" are and what they want. - The ultimate goal: Lots of real users will take a look at Letters and say, "This is what I've been looking for!" Give +1s to characters that represent your interests. Post a new character if none of them do. I'll offer a character who represents my interests: ### Paula Paula owns a white MacBook. She works as a SQL Server DBA at her job, where she has a company PC. But, her laptop is always with her, so she does her email on it instead. She works on open source projects in her spare time and is on one or two mailing lists. She is kind of a shut-in, but hey, she knows what she likes. She likes Twitter, but thinks Facebook is a huge waste of time. She reads lots of RSS feeds, and she's very happy to be a NetNewsWire user. Her relatives send her dumb chain letters all the time, which she furiously deletes. She has given up on asking them to stop. Paula has several email accounts, including for work, personal use, side projects, and a throwaway spam-avoiding account. She bought an Android phone and checks her Gmail with it regularly. On her Mac, she uses Mail. Mail's filtering rules don't really cut it for mailing lists. She doesn't like how poorly Mail.app deals with Gmail, but she also doesn't care for the Gmail web client, because browser chrome takes up too much screen space to have multiple windows. She also doesn't care for Thunderbird since it uses a lot of screen space. She does like the way Mail lets her use Quick Look, drag and drop, and other OS X niceties, along with multiple windows. But she would rather use the Gmail model of labels, and so far she is stuck with Mail. - Would Paula like tabs? Probably not, since she doesn't like her email to occupy a large window. - Would Paula like a three-panel layout? Yes, if uncluttered. She's happy with NetNewsWire, but she likes Mail's smaller windows. - Does Paula need POP support? Of course not. :) - And so forth. I have no idea if Paula represents anyone but me. If Paula represents you, give this a +1. If not, post a fictional user who matches you better. We can take the most popular few users and make them our litmus tests. -kev _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list List help: http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/email-init-ranchero.com
