On Jun 23, 2006, at 1:10 AM, Tracy R Reed wrote:
Outlook is entirely to blame. It divides the window in half horizontally and many users run at lower resolutions than those of us who know how toset up our computers. So they only see a few lines of the email at a time.
Actually, having seen the hell that is Eudora on my wife's computer at work (and yes, they've told her that she MUST use Eudora, Thunderbird is not allowed), I'm frankly amazed that she gets any productive use out of email at all.
The left side of the window is the typical folder tree view, with the rest of the window divided as you describe above. However, there are so many goddamned toolbars and message tabs (one for each open message) and message list tabs (one for each folder in the tree that you've "opened") that on a 17" LCD running at the native resolution (1280x1024, I think), there's still only enough room for 7 entries in the message list and 5 lines of text. The "designers" of Eudora jammed so much shit into the UI that there's barely any space left for actually using the application.
Reminds me of the first time I saw AutoCAD for Windows. Display could only do 800x600 in Windows (AutoCAD drove the same display at 1024x768 in DOS), and between the window title bar, menu bar, border, status bar at the bottom, toolbar, additional tool pallets, the workable drawing space was about the size of an index card. Turning off the toolbars was ... difficult, at best.
Absolutely atrocious.Outlook, at least, would allow her to have the main window be only folders & message list, and use her second display for reading/ composing messages in a separate window. Thunderbird is almost capable of doing the same thing (though I've found issues with using separate message windows at times.)
If you have the luxury of a wide-screen display, Outlook has a very nice "three-column" layout, that places folders, message list and message in side-by-side panes that run the height of the window. (Thunderbird has done this for a while, as have KMail and Entourage, the "Outlook-for-Mac-that's-better-than-Outlook".) Much to my pleasure, someone has finally provided a plugin for Apple Mail that allows for this layout, too.
I like large displays. :) Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu
PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
-- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
