From: mjinks Date: 20:31 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: eudora I hate Eudora so much. So very much. And I don't even use it. I hate it because I hate all things that foster and encourage stupidity in computer users, and Eudora does this with a vengeance. Please, Eudora programmers: they are called "mail headers". The whole world calls them "headers". People who don't know what a header is will not bother to make use of a menu option which refers to headers, or they'll try it out to see what it does and they won't be harmed. They do not now, nor did they ever, need an option called, "Blah blah blah". Seriously. "Blah blah blah"? What the fuck good is that going to do anybody? Eudora users can't tell one flavor of "Blah blah blah" from another so why not call them HEADERS? Do you know how stupid it sounds when a tech support person tells somebody to "turn on your 'Blah blah blah' option"? The obvious and inevitable first response is "Huh?" And do you know how stupid I feel when I ask any member of our user community to please send me a copy of a particular e-mail with the headers attached, when I know that chances are pretty good that they're a Eudora user and can't tell a header from a hole in the ground from their Blah blah blah? But I dare not say to them, by the way, if you're a Eudora user, please activate your Blah blah blah option, because that would make me sound like some sort of patronizing idiot.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 20:42 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: eudora > Do you know how stupid it sounds > when a tech support person tells somebody to "turn on your 'Blah blah > blah' option"? Holy ... um ... holy something. You're putting us on. (google) You're not putting us on. Someone snuck something nasty into the last shipment of bad acid for San Diego, that's for sure. Or some shipment, apparently that's been in there for years.
From: mjinks Date: 21:08 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: eudora On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 02:42:00PM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: > > Do you know how stupid it sounds > > when a tech support person tells somebody to "turn on your 'Blah blah > > blah' option"? > > Holy ... um ... holy something. You're putting us on. If only. > (google) > > You're not putting us on. No. > Someone snuck something nasty into the last shipment of bad acid for > San Diego, that's for sure. Or some shipment, apparently that's been > in there for years. Yes. Hate. Hate.
From: Phil!Gregory
Date: 20:57 on 30 Sep 2003
Subject: Re: eudora
* mjinks@xxxxxxxx.xxx <mjinks@xxxxxxxx.xxx> [2003-09-30 14:31 -0500]:
> I hate Eudora so much.
I hate Eudora becausethey only support version 2 LDAP, which is
incompatible with the LDAPv3 that everyone else uses.
I can't decide whether or not to hate their error messages. Personally, I
like them; they're informative (they like to quote bits of the POP
conversation that went wrong) and amusing ("I said 'PASS <Sssh, don't tell
anyone>' and the server said '500 User not found'"). But, sadly, most
regular users of the program tend to be confused by the error messages.
The cuteness gets in the way of understanding them, unless you're more
knowledgable than the average end user needs to be.
We're switching to Mozilla Mail at work. (And probably from there to
Thunderbird, once it's done.) I'll be bittersweet about seeing the
backside of Eudora. (At least it's not Outlook...)
From: mjinks Date: 21:18 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: eudora On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 03:57:07PM -0400, Phil!Gregory wrote: > > The cuteness gets in the way of understanding them, unless you're more > knowledgable than the average end user needs to be. Precisely. If simple unvarnished information isn't going to help, it's tantamount to an admission of futility to behave as though cuteness will. > (At least it's not Outlook...) Eudora was the first thing that popped into my mind when I became aware of this list. I thought, "Hot damn! Finally, a venue where one may hold forth on the intuitive, user-friendly canker that is Eudora!" I held back for quite a while. But, yes, at least it's not Outlook.
From: Paul Mison Date: 23:15 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: re: Eudora- changing the gripes On 30/09/2003 at 14:31 -0500, mjinks@xxxxxxxx.xxx wrote: >Please, Eudora programmers: they are called "mail headers". The whole >world calls them "headers". People who don't know what a header is will >not bother to make use of a menu option which refers to headers, or >they'll try it out to see what it does and they won't be harmed. They >do not now, nor did they ever, need an option called, "Blah blah blah". How hard is it to say "display the headers by clicking the button that's got 'blah blah blah' written on it."? Personally, my only complaint is that that the headers that the button conceals aren't chosen by a whitelist of allowed headers, but by scanning a blacklist of unwanted headers. Every time some Unix joker adds X-Phase-Of-Moon or a fucking poem because there's some crack-arsed idea about using it to sue spammers, I have to go and add them to the blacklist. Using a third party plugin. Last updated in, oh, 1995, so it lays out so badly in 5.2 that it hurts. (Slight interlude whilst I add X-Fecal-Tableau (how pleasant) X-International-Talk-Like-a-Pirate-Day (Oh, the amusement. No, wait. Thank someone I wasn't at work, or I'd have ended up killing at least two members of the list) X-Vladimir-Horowitz-Centennial (who the fuck?) X-Atmospheric-Gripe (great, weather whining in email headers) X-Uptime-Bragging (would be bragging if it weren't three days) to my blacklist) Oh, and yes, it should be under the Message menu item as well as just a button. (Apple's Address Book has a bunch of useful options that you can't discover without semi-random clicking on parts of the interface. NO THIS IS BAD LET ME SCROLL AROUND THE MENU STRUCTURE PLEASE THANK YOU.) On the other hand, have you ever *tried* to see headers in Outlook? Tools Internet Options Show Headers, and they're not even selectable? (Forgive any slight errors in remembrance; it's been a long time.) Give me a fucking break. I'll take my blah blah blah over that shit - and its unconfigurable whitelist - any day.
From: collver1 Date: 23:26 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: Eudora- changing the gripes On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 11:15:39PM +0100, Paul Mison wrote: > On the other hand, have you ever *tried* to see headers in Outlook? > Tools Internet Options Show Headers, and they're not even selectable? > (Forgive any slight errors in remembrance; it's been a long time.) > Give me a fucking break. I'll take my blah blah blah over that shit - > and its unconfigurable whitelist - any day. We use Outlook 2000 SR-1 at work. Open a message and, View -> Options Then the headers are in a scrollbox and are selectable.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 23:41 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: Eudora- changing the gripes > Oh, and yes, it should be under the Message menu item as well as just > a button. (Apple's Address Book has a bunch of useful options that > you can't discover without semi-random clicking on parts of the > interface. NO THIS IS BAD LET ME SCROLL AROUND THE MENU STRUCTURE > PLEASE THANK YOU.) Oh yes, this is one of my biggest gripes about Apple. Context-sensitive menus. They ran into this problem on the Xerox Star office system, and came up with the menu bar to avoid it. Then later on they found that context sensitive actions are useful accelerators, so they started putting them in. First there was option-click, then control-click for a menu (except when control-click already meant something else), then they made control click unversal. But they forgot why they'd dropped context menus in the first place. ALL actions should be visible in the menu bar. Putting service menus there was a good idea (from NeXT) but that doesn't really go far enough. CONTEXT menus and option-clicks and command-clicks and control-command- option-F1-corner-clicks should be alternatives. Secondary, not primary. Preferably managed by the user or learned from the user's actions so that frequently-used actions end up getting the acceleration. Instead we have a about six different APIs that hide different commands in different places, and it's a mess. Apple has WAY too much of a rep for their user interfaces. They've got the famous human interface guidelines, so they must be experts. Huh. They don't follow those guidelines (quicktime 4, anyone, how about the whole "metal" thing)? Some of them are just plain bad (single button mice, maniac insistence on the "cancel" button, ...). And they're right bastards about it (mac OS has been essentially themable at the OS level (which is the right place to do that) since 8.something, but Jobs declared the platinum, then aqua, then metal GUI are an important part of the brand or some damn thing). Mutter. Mutter.
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