--On Monday, September 11, 2006 2:14 PM +0200 Daniel Eckl <deckl@xxxxxxxx> wrote: Everyone is entitled to their opinion and yours is certainly welcome. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder... I have heard comments the cover pretty much the whole spectrum with regards to its usability and looks, and really, I don't see any particular opinion winning over the other. For the most part, opinions are based on how well that particular user loved a favorite e-mail client they previously used.
And it misses a lot of features I use every day. Virtual folders, inline attachments (jpegs for example), forwarding emails attached, view attached emails, Drag and Drop support and so on and so forth.
I must admit, I would love to see Virtual Folder support... however, is this implemented in the majority of IMAP clients out there? I am not sure that it is... so, to single out Mulberry for that is unreasonable. Is it a wish-list item? Certainly. Inline attachments are a long heated topic of debate here... of course there are features left to implement... however, Cyrus is one man and he has to prioritize what order of features should get implemented in. When Mulberry was not a free product, the features that were requested most and/or payed for were the features to get implemented first. Now that Cyrus is a one-man show (currently), it may be awhile before we see any new features get added... Forwarding as attachments is a function that already exists. Viewing attached e-mails exists, but maybe not the way you would like... If it can be viewed inline, Mulberry allows it... otherwise, you right-click and click "view" and it opens an external viewer... Drag and drop support is also implemented... though, without context in your complaint, I am not sure what you are expecting... I certainly can drag and drop an attachment from my desktop to the attachment section of my draft and it works as expected. Admittedly, I haven't dragged and dropped things anywhere else... Your arguments that things aren't as intuitive and easy to find is a good argument. Some people don't have problems (like me), but other do. This may be why some of the features you mention above aren't known to you. There was a project from CMU (by students?) that had taken on the job of analyzing the Mulberry interface to make recommendations on how to improve it. They did surveys and usability testing, and had entered an agreement (contract?) with Cyrusosft (Isamet) to implement most if not all of the recommended changes. This was a great step forward and a great idea. However, the project seem to go slowly and then disbanded when Isamet fell apart.
And a thunderbird with cached headers is multiple times faster in resorting and scrolling, not only over 3 MBit DSL Line, but even over LAN. It's fine that mulberry doesn't need to cache headers, but why isn't it able to do so? Loading on demand and then caching it would be the best of both worlds.
The same could be said for IMSP preferences. It isn't as noticeable over high speed connections, but over dialup... *whoosh*. The first thing I see is Mulberry download all of my preferences (and I have a lot). Then I see it turn around and write all the preferences back (at least from what I could see). Only then can I start to use Mulberry. Shutting down is also just as hard... all of my preferences get written back. I am not sure if there is a good answer... especially since I don't REALLY know what is going on... Another popular problem people complained about is the multi-threaded nature of Mulberry. Some Mulberry actions freezes the whole application and prevents you from doing anything until those actions are done. The point it, there is lots of improvements that could still be made and were in the works. Cyrus acknowledged the problems it had and was very clear where he stood and where he was going. It is a tough job being the author of one of the most popular IMAP clients on the marget, as a lot more demand and expectation gets added to that...
So just implementing every IMAP feature available might be the best thing for the server and the protocol, but not for the user. You need a intuitive interface and nowadays it really has to look nice, too if a non-geek should use it. And to be honest, mulberry simply looks horrible...
I would not agree with the "horrible" philosophy. I personally like the look and feel of Mulberry. I think the CMU approach was a good one and it would be nice for something like that to be resurrected. There is something to be said for surveys and usability testing... it answers some of the issues you have brought up.
But it's nice, that everyone who doesn't care about looking and usability now has a suitable free IMAP client availiable.
Uh... okay :) Of course, we really don't know how big the "everyone
who doesn't care about looking at usability" really is now, do we? As
I said before, there are a lot of people on BOTH sides of the equation.
Your points are well taken and they are valid... just offering another
user's perspective!
Scott
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Scott W. Adkins http://www.cns.ohiou.edu/~sadkins/
UNIX Systems Engineer mailto:adkinss@xxxxxxxx
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