Post by Serge PajakPost by zoaraAdditionally, "save" should not mean "send" - I might want to write part
of a post then come back to it later, so it should save in "Drafts" or
something. It should only send when I hit a big fat SEND button,
hitting the Send buttons means "I'm online and I want this article to
leave my computer". But the basic logic of an offline user-agent is that
you can do everything (including replying to posts) without an Internet
connection... because you're supposed to be offline.
OK, a big fat "Queue" button.
Post by Serge PajakIn an off-line newsreader, "saving" an article means queuting it to send
during the next time you will be online,
Uh? Why?
Pull yourself offline, and write an email using Mail (I suspect that
this works similarly in Eudora, and any other half-decent mailer, but
some of the terminology might be different).
Now, start three emails to yourself, with three subject lines:
1. This will be abandoned.
2. This will be saved for later.
3. This will be sent.
For the first email, close the window. You will be asked: "This mail has
not been sent. Do you want to save it as a draft and work on it later?".
Since you are abandoning the post, you respond "Don't Save". This can
also be achieved with ulrika-W, ulrika-D. The email is destroyed.
For the second email, close the window again, but this time respond with
"Save" (or, just hit the "save as draft" button). This can be done using
ulrika-W, return (or ulrika-S if you want the window to stay up). The
email will end up in your Drafts mailbox.
For the third email, hit "send" (or ulrika-shift-D). Mail will think,
then tell you that you're offline and your mail will be sent later. The
email will be in the Out mailbox.
Now go online, and Mail will notice. It delivers the email in the Out
mailbox, but *not* the one in the "Drafts" mailbox. "Save", in this
instance, has an entirely different meaining to "Queue" (or, as Mail
calls it, "Send").
This is, to my mind, exactly as it should be. Unless I specifically say
that I want to queue the email, it will **NOT** be queued. The behaviour
is simple and consistent across all applications; closing a dirty window
prompts the user with a "save changes" request. Saving the contents of a
window writes those changes to disk. Actually *doing* something with the
contents is a different thing entirely, and it's only MacSOUP (to my
knowledge) that ties in "save" with "queue".
An analogy; I'm writing an essay in Word, and when I finish I will print
it out and hand it in. So there will be several sessions of "open, edit,
save" followed by one final "print" once I've finished. Following the
logic of MacSOUP, the "save" command would put it on the print queue
(after all, when you close the window you're finished so you want to
print it once the printer is available, right?)
I completely understand that most people will *not* compose, close,
re-open and re-edit posts before sending, and that by far the most
common action is compose, queue... but that doesn't excuse breaking the
HIGs. In email, it's more likely that I'll compose, send - but that
doesn't mean that the "Close Window" semantics should be adjusted to
cater for the most common behaviour.
Close Window means just that, it does not mean "...and place into a
queue". "Save" means just that, and does not mean "...and place into a
queue". If you want to place something into a queue, you create a
specific command (keyboard, menu, button, icon or whatever) that places
it into a queue. You do **NOT** change the semantics of an
already-existing command.
Can you tell that this annoys me? It's the *principal* of the thing that
annoys me more than the practice. I got used to it, but the whole juicy
goodness of Macs is that they are easy to use and are consistent. For
example, "Cancel" always Cancels, unlike on Windows where it sometimes
Cancels, sometimes does the same as "OK", and sometimes just Stops (the
Mac uses "Stop" when it means "Stop"). An application destroying the
consistency of the "Close Window" metaphor is unforgivable in my eyes -
it's a step towards the inter-application inconsistencies of Windows.
Argh.
Rant over.
Post by Serge PajakSo the relevant way to think of pending articles is i) the ones that
will be send during the next connection because they're completed and
ii) the ones that won't. This is what the envelope is for.
The envelope is a fugly, inelegant hack to address a problem created by
not following the HIGs. Emailers can save drafts, and they don't need no
stinkin' envelope icons to denote draft/complete status.
-zoara-
--
"Analogies are like Vegemite sandwiches in a paper bag."
-- PeterD, uk.comp.sys.mac