[Design] High End Email

[Jonathan Blocksom]

On Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 11:09 AM, Mitch Kapor wrote, in response 
to my quoted weblog entry:
>> Why not write a fantastic email program, something with the 
>> capabilities of Zoe or Chandler but with a graceful, powerful user 
>> interface that doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater by 
>> trying to be cross platform.
> I believe it is possible to create "a graceful, powerful user 
> interface" and still be cross-platform.  The burden of proof is on us 
> and what we do with wxWindows, but watch us!

I was mostly referring more to Zoe here; as nifty as some of its 
features all I find it very icky to do email in a browser.  I can't 
really comment on Chandler's interface because the fact is that until 
you ship something it doesn't really have one!  I do think there's 
something to be said for integrating platform specific features, but 
those can be added over time and I would expect that platform specific 
versions of Chandler will pop up just as platform specific versions of 
Mozilla have.  And it's great that OSAF is helping out with WxWindows, 
because there's a real need for a good cross platform GUI library (and 
while I love Qt, it's a real problem that there's no GPL/Non-commercial 
version for my chosen platform of Mac OS X).

I think the real key to a graceful & powerful interface is those 
thousands of little decisions that get make in the UI programming 
process.  Spend the hours required to get those right and you'll have a 
great product on your hands.

JB

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Jonathan Blocksom
http://www.gollygee.com/weblogs/jblocksom/
GollyGee Software, Inc. -- http://www.gollygee.com