Hi Allie Thursday, September 4, 2003, 4:57:25 AM, you wrote:
AM> The thing with TB! is that if you wish for it to behave just like some AM> of the mainstream clients, you'll get frustrated and think it's flaky. Partly. My main reason to consider it so is the bugs I've experienced and the usability lapses. Not to take anything away from TB's power - I know it has it. And it has greatly improved usability too recently, so I'm still holding out hope for it. But you do make valid points, see below :) AM> The editor will drive you nuts, Check. AM>the interface may seem to be without flare AM> etc. :) Check! very emphatic check. I'd love to see flat toolbars, if nothing else. AM> If all you do is download mail to your inbox without much filtering, Yep. AM> use AM> a single signature Kind of. Most don't even have one. But I've been experimenting a little. AM> and a single set of templates, Same situation as with the signatures. AM> always use only the main AM> window with a single address book group and no address book templates AM> then TB! may not seem more useful than other solutions except from a AM> security POV. Excellent roundup. I'm impressed :) You summed up my feelings very accurately. The main reason I'm sticking with TB is the security and the fact that I've got so many addresses in its address book. Plus the feeling that "I know I can get this to do so much more". V>> Out of interest, could you list a few features of TB that you find V>> especially unique/indispensable/valuable? AM> - TB!'s 'pesky' editor (microEd) that produces such a love/hate AM> relationship among users is one. It gives me unrivaled pleasure to use AM> an editor that I'm confident is *always* displaying the format of the AM> message as it will be sent. Well, as it will be sent, yes. At the other (receiving) end, messages written in microEd using, say, Courier New, appear different when viewed with a default font such as Verdana. I've had problems with this. And since a number of people reading my mail use HTML viewing, and therefore usually not Courier or other fixed-width fonts, I can't be guaranteed that anything I send them will look identical on their machine. AM> It's really frustrating to receive poorly AM> formatted mail and the sender is unaware of this since it looked good on AM> their screen before sending. Happens with TB too like I said above. AM> The editor's text reflowing options also AM> makes possible, what would otherwise be tedious. What do you mean by text reflowing options? Auto-format, Alt-L and the like? AM> Since most of MicroEds AM> actions are keyboard shortcut triggered, using it in conjunction with a AM> Macro makes it a real pleasure to use and makes it possible for me to AM> use it with other clients like my newsreader. This sounds interesting. Could you elaborate? Maybe an example of a macro or usage with the newsreader.. AM> Quick templates are very useful in that they AM> centralize your templates. What I mean here is that you may have a macro AM> that you use in multiple templates in your address book or folders. You AM> can create this macro as a quick template and call it in your other AM> templates using the %Qinclude=<quick template> macro. The advantage here AM> is that if you wish to modify the quick template, its modification would AM> affect all templates which uses the quick template. Ah, I never really figured out what quick templates were for. This helps. AM> I also use quick templates for specific things like box quoting, Ok, I've seen the box-quote QT on the site. AM> pasting AM> in my message blocks of text I use frequently for example, moderatorial AM> stuff, Yes, seems like a useful trick. AM> to manually change my signatures Now *that* I find really interesting. How do you do this - by having different quick templates for different signatures? If so, doesn't remembering all those keyboard combinations get to be a pain after a while? AM> or quoting what's on the clipboard AM> which is a little different from pasting as a quotation using the AM> editor. Could you make this a little clearer? AM> - You can browser folders in separate windows. In this way, you can AM> actually be browsing multiple folders concurrently. This is impossible AM> with other clients where you're bound to viewing messages only via the AM> main window. It's not unusual that you'll be reading a particular AM> message and then wish to review another message. With TB!, you can open AM> this other message in a separate window if you like without disturbing AM> where you had reached in the other message. Another useful trick. I've never used it, mainly because I'm never sure what to expect by clicking the 'next' and 'previous' buttons? What do they normally jump to? Also, you can't view the account pane in two separate windows can you? From what I've seen, it can only be visible in the main window. AM> - The ticker virtual folder has profoundly changed my new mail handling AM> style. The ticker virtual folder displays all messages that are picked AM> up by the ticker. You can configure the ticker to display new messages only AM> for particular folders. In this way, I can browse new messages from AM> particular folders from a single message list. Interesting again. When you say virtual folder, you don't actually mean a folder somewhere in the account tree do you? I'm thinking of two things here - one is a folder that is visible in the tree but does not actually 'contain' messages, rather it contains 'links' to them. The other is that there is nothing in the folder tree at all, but you're just referring to the ticker as a 'virtual folder'. Which do you mean? AM> - TB!'s filtering is great and allows for a lot of possibilities. It AM> also allows me to pick important incoming messages out of the heavy AM> traffic through the use of sounds and using colour groups. Yep I do that. But it's fairly common in other clients too. AM> - I like TB!'s PGP integration. With its macro support, I can automate AM> my PGP use in terms of signing +/- encrypting outgoing messages. Outlook has PGP integration too. I haven't used it though. AM> There are other niceties, but these are the winning features for me that AM> I can never really duplicate while trying other Windows clients. Thanks for a very polite and helpful reply Allie. I'm sure everyone appreciates your advice as much as I do. If any other power users are following this thread, I would love to hear about innovative ways in which you use TB. Someone else voiced the same opinion as well, so let the ideas pour forth! On your advice, I uninstalled ZA today and tried BlackICE PC protection 3.6. Automatic mail checks still don't work for me. Could you tell me how you configured your installation to handle this? It's very disappointing. Cheers, -Vishal ________________________________________________ Current version is 2.00 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
