2nd Round Screenshots of Jake's Newsgroup Reader--Comments Please
John Jacobson
put a couple of screenshots up for commentary. The critiques I got back here
in this newsgroup were very very useful and I have implemented some of them.
New screenshots are available and I would love to read commentary on these new
screenshots. Just keep in mind the following points:
1) None of the final icons have been designed yet. Every icon you see in
the screenshots is just a placeholder for now.
2) Every pane is resizeable and/or hideable.
3) The shortening of newsgroup names from things like
borland.public.delphi.non-technical to things like b.p.d.non-technical can be
turned off and on with the button currently marked with the "abc" icon.
4) The reportview above the message pane and to the left of the thread tree
has multiple views: By Date, By Subject and By Sender. Also, the columns can
be resized and moved around, and of course sorting by a column is as simply as
clicking on the column button. I realize that most newsreaders have a single
control for displaying newsgroup messages en masse instead of my two
(reportview and tree), but trust me, once you start using a display that lets
you quickly see messages in chronological order at the same time you can see
their thread context, you quickly get used to it and start to prefer it. I did
anyway. For users that don't like two different views of the messages en
masse, they can minimize one of the controls to invisibility.
5) Because this is a multithreaded newsreader, a single-tree display for
Server/Newsgroup/Messages/Replies is not really viable. I think it would be
preferable to be able to fiddle around in one newsgroup while downloading
messages in another, etc. without having to remember where in the tree you
were when you started a task. The multitabbed design I have chosen has the
advantage of making it rather easy to go back and forth between ongoing
activities. You can create as many newsgroup tabs as you want, each one
operating independently.
6) I haven't yet changed the newsgroup detail view, so it is not included
in this set of screenshots. I also haven't gotten around to writing the logic
to identify the first non-quoted line of text for use in the treeview or
reportview, but I plan to. Several people suggested this was a great feature
of VA (IIRC) that would be nice to see. It turns out that if this is going to
be useful it must know how to avoid the lines above quoted text that say
things like "So and so wrote in message...". There is no standard for these
introductory texts, so this is not going to be the simplest logic to implement
(usefully anyway).
7) Keystroke shortcuts will be put in, but are not in now.
8) Right now, there is a toolbar for the main screen and a toolbar for each
newsgroup tab that is created.There are several ways I can resolve this
problem:
a) Merge tab toolbars into the main toolbar as they are displayed, the
way MDI menus were merged in MDI applications. This has the problem that
toolbuttons for tab-specific events are then on the main form itself, which
seems to be conceptually sloppy.
b) Get rid of the main toolbar in favor of mainmenu items. This has
problems: 1) increases the number of mouse clicks needed, 2) makes it take
longer to get to the "Hide" button, which is designed to quickly hide the
application from view if somebody suddenly walks into the room and you don't
want them seeing what you've been doing in the newsreader.
c) Move the main toolbar to the side or bottom (blech!).
9) The envelope button on the far right end of the main toolbar creates
newsgroup tabs. As soon as a newsgroup tab is created it looks like
http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view3.gif but with the three panes on the RHS
empty. As soon as a user double-clcks on a newsgroup, the LHS newsgroups pane
minimizes to a width of 1 (there is a splitter there that the user can use to
bring it back if they want) and the newsgroup tab then looks like
http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view4.gif .
10) http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view5.gif is the tab for writing replies.
This is very unfinished in terms of GUI design, but I include it here for a
starting point for a discussion of what the ideal message reply screen might
be (it is far from that right now). As a newsgroup reader, what would you like
to see changed in this screen and how? Here is a screenshot of the reply
parameters tab: http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view6.gif . The green '+' is for
adding newsgroups to the distribution list (it pops up a dialog for this
purpose of picking a newsgroup), and the red '-' is for removing newsgroups
from the distribution list. All these fields are filled in by default, based
on the message to which this is a reply, or the settings for this newsgroup.
11) I don't know what the deal is with the partial time display in the
statusbar. TOvcStatusBar seems to be doing an incomplete repainting job or
something. BTW, that time is the elapsed time for the current task (such as
downloading headers).
--
John M. Jacobson
Visit Jake's Delphi Page at http://www.xnet.com/~johnjac
"Oh, no! She's stuck in an infinite loop, and he's an idiot. Oh well,
that's love for you."
-Professor Farnsworth in "Futurama"
Deborah Pate (TeamB)
2) Every pane is resizeable and/or hideable.
>>
Are they rearrangeable at all? To get the message pane the
size I want, without making the thread pane too narrow to
be useful, I'd need to be able to put it completely above
the message pane (like the report view). Is that possible?
<<John:
As soon as a user double-clcks on a newsgroup, the LHS
newsgroups pane minimizes to a width of 1
>>
It would be nice if one could choose the width it should
shrink to. :)
<<John:
the ideal message reply screen
>>
I assume you have options somewhere that determine font,
quoting rules, etc. Something else I'd really like is a
warning when I reply to a crossposted message. I'd also
like to be able to see a right-hand margin line (if I
compose in a fixed width font, that should be doable?).
It's definitely coming along, btw. Congrats. :)
--
Deborah Pate (TeamB) http://delphi-jedi.org
TeamB don't see posts sent via Google or ISPs
Use the real Borland server: newsgroups.borland.com
http://www.borland.com/newsgroups/genl_faqs.html
Colin Wilson
> I also haven't gotten around to writing the logic
> to identify the first non-quoted line of text for use in the treeview or
> reportview, but I plan to. Several people suggested this was a great
feature
> of VA (IIRC) that would be nice to see. It turns out that if this is
going to
> be useful it must know how to avoid the lines above quoted text that say
> things like "So and so wrote in message...". There is no standard for
these
> introductory texts, so this is not going to be the simplest logic to
implement
> (usefully anyway).
You can't cater for everything - there are always messages that will catch
it out - like messages written in foreign languages, etc. At the moment I
treat replies that start with lines that contain 'in article', 'wrote in
message', 'wrote:' or 'said:' as starting a quote, lines that start with
'>' as the quote body, and the actual message starts with the first
non-blank line after that.
But I must get around to handling 'Deborah's Quoting Style' (tm) !
Colin
web: www.wilsonc.demon.co.uk/delphi.htm
Posted with Xananews!
Uffe Kousgaard
news:3c950cd9$1_1@dnews...
> But I must get around to handling 'Deborah's Quoting Style' (tm) !
>
remember he once wrote it should date back to some old style of qouting
from before www, could be compuserve or something similar.
Deborah Pate (TeamB)
But I must get around to handling 'Deborah's Quoting Style'
(tm) !
>>
<tentatively grateful smile>
Rudy Velthuis (TeamB)
Pate (TeamB) says...
> <<Colin Wilson:
> But I must get around to handling 'Deborah's Quoting Style'
> (tm) !
> >>
> <tentatively grateful smile>
Pfffft! You got that from Philippe, who doesn't (and didn't) even have
VA himself!
--
Rudy Velthuis (TeamB)
"Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which
could only have originated in California." -- Edsger Dijkstra
Deborah Pate (TeamB)
Pfffft! You got that from Philippe
>>
True, true. But at least I had the ability to recognize a
good thing when I saw it. :)
Wayne Menzie
@dnews:
> But I must get around to handling 'Deborah's Quoting Style' (tm) !
Don't get me started. . .
--
Wayne Menzie
Mike Orriss (TeamB)
> Pfffft! You got that from Philippe, who doesn't (and didn't) even have
> VA himself!
>
Philippe used to get it wrong so that the 'quotes' were the wrong color,
but he was gracious enough to change when it was pointed out.
Mike Orriss (TeamB and DevExpress)
Colin Wilson
> Those tentatively grateful smiles get me every time :)
But I'm not going to adopt that quoting style myself (of course). Whatever
next - You'll have me putting in an 'Expand All Threads' feature!
Colin Wilson
<tentatively grateful smile>
>>
Those tentatively grateful smiles get me every time :)
Colin
Gerald Nunn
First off definitely much better then the first iteration IMHO.
"John Jacobson" <johnjac[nospam]@xnet.com> wrote in message
news:3c94dec8_1@dnews...
> http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view3.gif
Things I would change:
1) The list of newsgroups should use the same font as the message view. I
don't see the point of bolding them personally. Also, I don't like the grid
lines but that can be a personal taste item
2) The seperation of the panes could be cleaner. I kind of prefer the way
Visual Studio seperates panes. I've done the same sort of thing in my Java
IDE, see this screen shot (http://www.gexperts.com/screenshots/lmain.png)
and look at the project viewer and class browser. Basically you just indent
the content of the pane a bit by 4 pixels and define a cleaner border.
3) I still don't like having the report view and the threaded view as two
seperate panes. Outlook has a single pane that is easily sorted but is still
threaded and I prefer that look myself.
> http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view6.gif.
On thing here, my preference when using buttons that are not part of a
toolbar is to never make them flat. My reasoning is that it is to easy for
users to mistake them as buttons. In the screenshot above I'd probably
replace the buttons with standard command buttons with captions "Add" and
"Remove".
On the whole though, very nice progression indeed and a big improvement over
the first round of screenshots.
Gerald
mamcx
For example, grouping (not only sort) threads for day/week, sender,
alfabethic, Unresponded/Responded, etc...
That (i think) is a real cool feature for a newsreader.
Also, this program is (in the future) free? Look very good... But look "too"
database, a newsreader must look like a newspaper?
Deborah Pate (TeamB)
You'll have me putting in an 'Expand All Threads' feature!
>>
<tentatively enthusiastic fawning>
:)
Rudy Velthuis (TeamB)
> Philippe used to get it wrong so that the 'quotes' were the wrong color,
> but he was gracious enough to change when it was pointed out.
It was you who pointed it out, IIRC. <g>
He first used >> << style, instead of << >>, IIRC.
Chris Dickerson
> http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view5.gif
You're getting warm John, looking good! Like Gerald stated, try black and
white icons, color them when mouse hovers.. for some reason all that color
justs jumps out at me.. and strangles me. ;)
Chris
Mike Orriss (TeamB)
> It was you who pointed it out, IIRC. <g>
>
I know, but it didn't seem important who raised the issue <g>
Kyle Cordes
news:3c94dec8_1@dnews...
> 5) Because this is a multithreaded newsreader, a single-tree
display for
> Server/Newsgroup/Messages/Replies is not really viable. I think it
would be
> preferable to be able to fiddle around in one newsgroup while
downloading
I don't see how your two points above connect. Why does the GUI control
choice have anything to do with the multithreadedness? I can easily
imaging 10 threads updating some data that is displayed by a single tree
view, and can likely envision a single-threaded app with tabs, panes,
tree, and grids everywhere.
--
[ Kyle Cordes * ky...@kylecordes.com * http://kylecordes.com ]
[ Consulting, Training, and Software development tips and ]
[ techniques: Java, Delphi, ASTA, BDE Alternatives Guide, ]
[ JB Open Tools, EJB, Web applications, methodologies, etc. ]
John Jacobson
"Deborah Pate (TeamB)" <d.p...@blueyonder.co.not-this-bit.uk> wrote in
message news:VA.000010e...@blueyonder.co.not-this-bit.uk...
> <<Colin Wilson:
> You'll have me putting in an 'Expand All Threads' feature!
> >>
>
> <tentatively enthusiastic fawning>
This is one of the things I would have liked to be in XANANews. I thought
it annnoying that I had to indivudually expand threads every time.
Mike Swaim
replies.
> This is very unfinished in terms of GUI design, but I include it here for
a
> starting point for a discussion of what the ideal message reply screen
might
> be (it is far from that right now). As a newsgroup reader, what would you
like
> to see changed in this screen and how?
signature picker?
> Here is a screenshot of the reply
> parameters tab: http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view6.gif . The green '+' is
for
> adding newsgroups to the distribution list (it pops up a dialog for this
> purpose of picking a newsgroup), and the red '-' is for removing
newsgroups
> from the distribution list. All these fields are filled in by default,
based
> on the message to which this is a reply, or the settings for this
newsgroup.
Will you ever want to reply to a different server than the one the
original message was on?
Also, how do I mail a reply? (Either mailing it seperately, or posting and
mailing it.)
--
Mike Swaim
Michae...@UBSWenergy.com
Disclaimer: Yeah, like I speak for <employer>.
John Jacobson
"Mike Swaim" <Michae...@ubswenergy.com> wrote in message
news:3c962c8a$1_2@dnews...
> It looks OK, although having it as a tab seems kinda wierd. How about a
> signature picker?
That's what those blank buttons above it do.
> Will you ever want to reply to a different server than the one the
> original message was on?
Yes. There are anonymizing post-only news servers available. You'd read
the messages from your local ISP's newsgroup server and then post through
the anonymizer.
> Also, how do I mail a reply? (Either mailing it seperately, or posting
and
> mailing it.)
I haven't added the email stuff yet. It'll be in there.
John Jacobson
"John Jacobson" <johnjac@[nospam]xnet.com> wrote in message
news:3c962fa8$1_2@dnews...
>
> "Mike Swaim" <Michae...@ubswenergy.com> wrote in message
> news:3c962c8a$1_2@dnews...
> > It looks OK, although having it as a tab seems kinda wierd. How about
a
> > signature picker?
>
> That's what those blank buttons above it do.
DOH!! Wrong view. I was thinking of the newsgroup details tab. The
message parameter tab does indeed need a signature picker! Thanks for
noticing that!
Larry Leuallen
> 10) http://home.xnet.com/~johnjac/view5.gif is the tab for writing replies.
Watch the over quoting! <g>.
Larry Leuallen
Colin Wilson
OK - there's now a vew version on my website.
* Customizeable quoting styles.
* Recognizes 'Deborah's Quoting Style' (tm)
* New 'Expand Thread' and 'Expand All Threads' functions
* New Auto Expand Thread option, automatically expands entire thread when
you skip to a message.
* New Auto Centralize option, centralizes the focused message in the
display.
* New Auto Mark As Read option makrs the message as read when you display
it (turned off by default)
Enjoy!
Nobody
news:3c97c9bd_2@dnews...
> Deborah Pate (TeamB) wrote:
>
> OK - there's now a vew version on my website.
>
> * Customizeable quoting styles.
> * Recognizes 'Deborah's Quoting Style' (tm)
> * New 'Expand Thread' and 'Expand All Threads' functions
> * New Auto Expand Thread option, automatically expands entire thread when
> you skip to a message.
> * New Auto Centralize option, centralizes the focused message in the
> display.
> * New Auto Mark As Read option makrs the message as read when you display
> it (turned off by default)
>
> Enjoy!
I like this contest of newsreaders ! -- we may endup with something so good
that some of us might be able to dump OE.
John Kaster (Borland)
> I like this contest of newsreaders ! -- we may endup with something so good
> that some of us might be able to dump OE.
Should we make this a community programming contest? (Only half joking.) Best
email and/or newsgroup client written with Borland products?
--
John Kaster, Borland Developer Relations, http://community.borland.com
$1280/$50K: Thanks to my donors!
http://homepages.borland.com/jkaster/tnt/thanks.html
Buy Kylix! http://www.borland.com/kylix * Got source?
http://codecentral.borland.com
The #1 Java IDE: http://www.borland.com/jbuilder
Nobody
news:3c97e248_2@dnews...
> "Nobody" wrote:
> > I like this contest of newsreaders ! -- we may endup with something so
> good
> > that some of us might be able to dump OE.
>
> didnt know before, and I'm less likely to dump OE as a result. <g>
>
I agree. Everything counts !
Dave Nottage (TeamB)
> I like this contest of newsreaders ! -- we may endup with something so
good
> that some of us might be able to dump OE.
Actually, the discussion has helped me discover things about OE that I
didnt know before, and I'm less likely to dump OE as a result. <g>
--
Dave Nottage (TeamB)
Dave Nottage (TeamB)
> > I like this contest of newsreaders ! -- we may endup with something
so good
> > that some of us might be able to dump OE.
>
> Should we make this a community programming contest? (Only half
joking.) Best
> email and/or newsgroup client written with Borland products?
Hmm.. I think you'd need to give it a long timeframe <g>
--
Dave Nottage (TeamB)
John Jacobson
> > Should we make this a community programming contest? (Only half
> joking.) Best
> > email and/or newsgroup client written with Borland products?
>
> Hmm.. I think you'd need to give it a long timeframe <g>
Ouch! That hurts because it was so true.
Ingvar Nilsen
> Nobody wrote:
>
> Should we make this a community programming contest? (Only half joking.) Best
> email and/or newsgroup client written with Borland products?
>
If we can agree upon what 'best' means.
I wrote the 'best' e-mail client yesterday, took me 1 hour using Indy.
It is _best_ because I can use it inside my company's firewall to
access my private e-mail account. Have no idea why Outlook and Netscape
isn't let through as long as my simple Delphi-made one is.
But it works, and therefore is the best!
Problem when using the word 'best' is that at least 80 percent of
us developers will overload any application with features in the
hope of getting 'best'.
The best newsgroup client for me would be one that has these two
features:
1) Scan all topics _and_ messages in a certain newsgroup for certain
words.
2) Alert me when someone has responded to my particular post in a
certain thread.
You would have other requirements because you post at least 100 times
as much as I do, a shareware author another set of requirements again,
and so on.
BTW, I think the idea is great, provided we can come up with a set
of specs and requirements.
Ingvar Nilsen
John Jacobson
> Actually, the discussion has helped me discover things about OE that I
> didnt know before, and I'm less likely to dump OE as a result. <g>
Once I've added all the features I want to add to my newsreader, OE will
look like a toy in comparison.
John Jacobson
"Ingvar Nilsen" <telc...@NOSPAMonline.no> wrote in message
news:3C982A41...@NOSPAMonline.no...
> The best newsgroup client for me would be one that has these two
> features:
> 1) Scan all topics _and_ messages in a certain newsgroup for certain
> words.
To be useful this would require a high-speed connection, because it would
have to download all the messages, not just the headers.
> 2) Alert me when someone has responded to my particular post in a
> certain thread.
Ditto. I'm thinking an icontray icon and a sound would be the best way to
notify the user. I'll be adding this soon.
Ingvar Nilsen
> "Ingvar Nilsen" <telc...@NOSPAMonline.no> wrote in message
>>1) Scan all topics _and_ messages in a certain newsgroup for certain
>>words.
>>
>
> To be useful this would require a high-speed connection, because it would
> have to download all the messages, not just the headers.
>
Yes, I realize this, but I still think it would be very useful.
Actually, I would not use this function in real time even when using
a high-speed connection, but let it run in the background.
I think this function is useful for at least two purposes:
1) Start the reader, go and have dinner, come back and browse the news
group faster that ever.
2) For people who only want to respond to certain messages, a book
author for example who happens write about UML might want to see only
message bodies containing the word 'UML'.
I still think this would be a very nice feature, provided you don't pay
per byte downloaded :)
Ingvar Nilsen
John Jacobson
"Ingvar Nilsen" <telc...@NOSPAMonline.no> wrote in message
> I still think this would be a very nice feature, provided you don't pay
> per byte downloaded :)
I'll think about it.
Deborah Pate (TeamB)
* New 'Expand Thread' and 'Expand All Threads' functions
>>
Thank you. :)
John Kaster (Borland)
> Hmm.. I think you'd need to give it a long timeframe <g>
Some people already have a head start! But, we could do it for 3 months.
John Kaster (Borland)
> Once I've added all the features I want to add to my newsreader, OE will
> look like a toy in comparison.
Don't forget that some people like to play with toys. <g>
Andrew Rybenkov
> didnt know before, and I'm less likely to dump OE as a result. <g>
Same here :)
--
Andrew Rybenkov,
the programmer who walks by himself.