Comments on: iPad, Letters.app and Nerd Myopia

By: Yogi

Yogi — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:05:00 +0000

OK, great. Now, please tell us WHY you want them.

By: Yogi

Yogi — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:05:48 +0000

OK, great. Now, please tell us WHY you want them.

By: Ianf

Ianf — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:04:39 +0000

I'm glad you're questioning my by necessity sketchy EXAMPLES of enhancements now missing in email clients. Observe I never said any of that should be permanently on screen, preferably configurable on demand. Because some of the listed functions indeed are novel, here is what I IMAGINE they'd be good for (and bear in mind that I am talking about heavy mail usage: in excess of 150 messages a day; 3000-4000 per month; and [cumulatively] several thousand valid inquiries under a 10-year period - I no longer care to remember, nor trust my instinctive recall of history of/for each inquiry).

• mail-frequency diagram: an at-a-glance
graphic overview of historical mail flow
with the same individual mail-originator/
recipient.

• a pseudo-tag cloud: auto-compiled from
exchanges ONLY with said originator; to
abet in determining the nature of recurring
inquiries (if any).

• "statistical" diagrams of signal:noise
ratios (however defined): helps me decide
me whether correspondent is "serious"
(however defined), and cares to express
herself clearly without endless tail
inclusions (which lower overall compre-
hension of the exchange and can not be
relied upon to provide the background).

• percentage of threads un/answered:
cumulative values of un/ resolved or
one-off/ recurring nature of the
correspondence.

Observe that these were just EXAMPLES of functions possible within current mail-client model, all perfectly suitable to be expressed by e.g. space-saving Tuftian sparklines [ http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch... ]; and I could think of several more complex ones were mail paradigm to change....

By: Yogi

Yogi — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:59:49 +0000

I'm all fired up about music, sheet music and tabs, for me and the band and students as well (all turn the pages together, now.)

I can't believe that people are dismissing it as a toy. All I'll need on the road is a phone and the pad. Big win for my wrists.

By: Sigivald

Sigivald — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:40:46 +0000

Maybe I'm missin' something here, but why would I (or any other human "client") want to see almost any of that, when viewing a message?

What will a message exchange frequency diagram tell me (that I didn't already know; "X talks to me a lot" or "X doesn't talk to me a lot").

Even worse, a word tag cloud?

I mean, I suppose the proof is in the pudding and it would be worth looking at if someone made it, just to see if somehow it's useful - but on its face, it's stuff I don't care about masquerading as information, taking up screen real-estate and cognitive effort.

Maybe email really does need a new client model ... but I don't think that's the one it needs.

By: Ianf

Ianf — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:49:09 +0000

Before self-imploding, did anyone there even attempt to reexamine/ redefine the basic sequential-message-river paradigm of email clients, or was it all a battle over fave features? Email badly needs a new client model, one designed with human, rather than machine heuristics in mind [ http://google.com/search?q=define%3Aheuristics ]. Example: when viewing any single message, the client should display instantly-compiled (e.g.) mail exchange frequency diagram(s) for that correspondent; most frequent common words (=pseudo-tag clouds); statistics over length and original-to-quoted text (akin to signal:noise) ratios; percentages of threads unanswered, etc. The client already knows all that [and Gmail makes use of it], some of it well in advance and very suitable for iterative accumulation, so why shouldn't the recipients get to see it as well?

By: The Angry Drunk

The Angry Drunk — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:01:10 +0000

To be fair, they did come up with a Vision Statement at some point (for the life of me I can't find it now though) and I think that the consensus is that the formatting issues have to do with Mail.app using format=quoted-printable instead of format=flowed. Nonetheless, they're still wankers.

By: Ianf

Ianf — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:12:59 +0000

Agree with you, Drunky (and I'm stone sober, btw., as always), but, where Letters.app is concerned, how can ANYONE seriously treat a concept described solely as "awesome" ["Need new email client; must be awesome"]; there is no obvious Mission Statement (that I can see); and the ensuing project of writing presumably RFC-822-compliant mail client is led by someone who can not even be bothered to submit messages in archive-readable format? Or else, how do you propose we read the discussion msgs with unbroken paragraph-length lines? ( E.g. http://lists.ranchero.com/pipermail/email-init-... )

By: Gatesbasher

Gatesbasher — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:09:25 +0000

I think Speirs (and you) hit the nail on the head. When I hear that such-and-such a device can't do "Real Work™", in most cases it turns out the speaker considers "real work" to be fucking around with the computer trying to get it to do something—anything. Which is great if that's your job, but it's not for all of us.

By: josh

josh — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:19:51 +0000

People need to realize there's a difference between "power users who are also developers and tinkerers" and "power users who just use something a fuck ton". And a device like the iPad will encourage more people to become "power computer users", just like the iPhone encouraged people to use data from their cell phone provider.