Hello Allie and other TBTECHS,
On Wednesday, February 07, 2001 at 04:00:59 GMT -0500 A . Curtis Martin wrote on
"! 1.49: Message Column Lists moves to the right, message threading":
ACM> X-News' style is also interesting. The threading is done using the
ACM> subject column, but the subject isn't shown over and over again as in
ACM> Agent. A card is used instead with double quotes to indicate that the
ACM> subject is the same. The cards are cascaded within the subject column
ACM> which provides a lot of space for this.
Well, Allie - as I appear to be the only person defending TB's threading as it
is, I hope that you will forgive me for being this persistent :-) Here goes:
I will grant you that X-news' way of threading is interesting. But in my
opinion, you haven't mentioned - not in the message I am now replying to, at
least - the *most* interesting feature of it's threading:
When the the thread expands across the limits of the subject column, it really
*does* expand across the limits - quite literally!!! The "cards" - as you call
them - are then seen in the *next* column - "under" the text of this column, so
to speak. This is fascinating, but it seems to be impossible to do anything with
these cards - their only use seems to be to notify the user of the additional
messages in the thread. You cannot click on them etc. Nonetheless, this seems to
be a better solution than Agent's limit on the number of follow-ups - were it
not for the facts that
1) X-News' solution does not allow it to dispense with the "From"-column
2) it seems that you have to adjust the width of the subject-column in order to
get to a "clickable" version of the message-cards.
Besides, it's not exactly a pretty sight to see the "transgressing" messages
merged into the next column.
The news-reader in Opera 5.02 solves these problems in yet another way:
Just like TB it allows opening and closing branches of threads. Each branch has
it own folder. When the thread expands to much to be showed within the
"From"-column (which is the threading-column in this news-reader) the folders
representing the various following-up levels are shown on a line underneath the
last message allowed to be shown by the width of the thead-column. Each folder
has a number according to its follow-up level. If you open level 4, the
beginning of the names of the messages in that folder are shown on a line
underneath the folder and you are free to open them, mark them read etc. In my
opinion, this is the best alternative to TB as it is (although I am not sure it
is an alternative, I would prefer). I look forward to learn of other views on
this.
--
Best regards,
Jannik Lindquist
The Bat! Ver. 1.49
Windows 98 4 10 2222 A
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