Re: macho 0.4 released

On Sun, 2003-11-09 at 12:04, Klaus Weidner wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 09:53:00AM -0800, Miles Egan wrote:
> >     * added thread context view in message view
> 
> The thread view is *very* nice and extremely useful. 

Thanks.  I kind of like it too.

> > I'd appreciate any feedback on the hotkey thread navigation especially.
> 
> The hotkeys didn't work directly in Mozilla Firebird, but since it does
> type-ahead matching for links that works almost as well - i.e. press <J>
> and <Enter> to go to the next one.

Shift-J should work, but, like I said in my last message, it's clear
that this isn't obvious enough. 

> I'm not convinced that chronological [Prev] and [Next] buttons make much
> sense though in a threaded view - I was at first confused by the way they
> seem to jump randomly through the archive.
> 
> My suggestion would be something similar to the way slrn and other
> newsreader handle threaded views - get rid of chronological [Prev] and
> [Next] and use the thread-prev and thread-next by default, but add some
> tree-based navigation options:
> 
> 	[prev thread] skip back to the previous toplevel article.
> 
> 	[next thread] skip ahead to the next toplevel article.
> 
> 	[parent] select this article's parent (it would be really nice if
> 		that would work even if the parent is in last month's
> 		archive)
> 
> 	[skip subthread] skip ahead to the next article that isn't in
> 		reply to (in the subtee below) this one, i.e. to skip
> 		discussions that went off on a tangent.

I like it.  I think you're right that the current prev/next arent
especially useful.  I'll see about implementing some of the above.  This
is the kind of thing that's hard to see if you've been looking too
closely at a problem for too long so thanks for the feedback & fresh
perspective.

> I've got a couple of ideas that would require some statefulness (this
> could be client-side using cookies, or server-based), to make the
> interface smarter by keeping track of read articles, preferences and so
> on. Would you be interested in going in that direction? The web message
> boards I've seen are mostly rather braindead, and I'd love to have
> something smarter available. I'm not sure if I'll have time to hack on
> this though, so many cool projects and so little time :-(

I had a couple of goals for Macho when I started that I'd like to
maintain:

1. Should be very simple to install.
2. Shouldn't require any external software to do its job.
3. Should generate static archives that could be saved and browsed
indefinitely without Macho.

That said, there are a lot of interesting things you could do with a
mail archive if you generated at least some of it dynamically.  Search,
for instance.  I think I'd still prefer not to do anything that broke
any of the above but if something could be layered on top I'd probably
be interested.  I suppose you could do a fair amount with fancier
client-side javascript.  If you have some more specific suggestions to
make I'd like to hear them.

-- 
Miles Egan <[email protected]>

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