[Design] High End Email

[petite_abeille]

On Friday, Mar 7, 2003, at 15:00 Europe/Zurich, Jonathan Blocksom wrote:

> 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 think that Zoe's focus is not really on "do[ing] email". It's more a  
librarian that happen to organize your emails. Something more in the  
line of Jamie Zawinski's "Intertwingle""

http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html

With the mandatory Ted Nelson quote:

"Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep  
pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and  
sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled."

In which case a "browser" metaphor works surprisingly well.

>  I can't really comment on Chandler's interface because the fact is  
> that until you ship something it doesn't really have one!

Indeed ;-)

>  I do think there's something to be said for integrating platform  
> specific features

Yes! Even something as alien as Zoe integrates nonetheless with key  
"platform specific features" like system services or Mail.app on osx:

http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/itstories/ 
story.php?data=stories&num=63&sec=2

Or even (ab)use some good old protocols to provide integration at the  
file system level:

http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/itstories/ 
story.php?data=stories&num=60&sec=2

All this to say that no matter how spiffy Chandler turns to be, it  
needs to integrates will other existing applications/services.

To paraphrase John Donne: "No application is an island".

Cheers,

PA.