August 2005 Archives

Charles Platt has written an excellent article on Sam Cohen, author of Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb. The article is interesting from a number of viewpoints: Cohen's belief in the morality of his creation, his background with RAND during The Cold War; but also Platt's talent for providing a very good teleological view of how much US foreign policy has remained the same since the close of WW II.

I think the only thing that isn't perhaps given enough depth are the Reagen years. Growing up in the 1980's was a fearful time for many of us. Anyone remember the deluge of nuclear armageddon films like The Day After, a film that my entire highschool was taken to.

Nuclear war did seem like a very present danger and was a time that was filled with a lot of angst for many on the left. I remember long term anti-nuclear demonstrations in the UK that became permanent campsites outside military bases and nuclear facilities. Here in New Zealand we went through our own anti-nuclear transformation. The banning of nuclear warships, which ultimately broke up the ANZUS alliance and created antipathy from both Australia and the US. Then of course French Intelligence decided to come here and bomb the Greenpeace ship, The Rainbow Warrior.

Platt's article also has an insight into the militaristic machinations of history after WW II and succinctly explains Bush, Jr's need to create an omnipresent enemy. This is classic bogeyman stuff. Fear construction to help domestic and foreign policy fall in line with a vision created by right-wing think tanks and gung-ho militarists. Even if those militarists work behind desks and never see the consequences. Profits of Fear

I discovered this photographer some time ago and really liked how evocative her work is. Each shot seems to be a glimpse of a minute part of a much larger narrative.

However, i've been partially obsessed with the above photo for some time now, and still can't quite figure out what it is that keeps me coming back to see it. In part, I think it's because she reminds me of someone in my past, but i'm not sure it's that either. Is it the beauty of the woman in the foreground or the fact that she doesn't want me to tell about the childhood I may have had? Or does she not want me to ask about hers?

I hate open letters. They're almost always whining about some personal injustice the writer feels they've suffered; so in the spirit of something else entirely, I present a letter from a Mozilla Mac tester who seems to be suffering unrequited love.

Let me please say that I like Thunderbird on the Mac, but I really want to love Thunderbird on the Mac. I also don't want to sound ungrateful, because I can see very, very hard work, but I personally find Thunderbird's handling of RSS in the News and Blogs component unintuitive and extremely un-mac-like. One thing i've discovered in the last 2-3 months of testing Firefox and Thunderbird on OS X is how varied individual usage of the applications are. Usability for one person can often not be likened in any way to another - so, for what it's worth, this is just how I use Thunderbird and what I think would work better. And i'm hoping, what would work better for you.

In some part i've used NetNewsWire as a benchmark, mostly because Thunderbird shares a similar look with a three pane view. There are a bunch of others i've personally tried, but I keep coming back to NNW and the similarities with Thunderbird, I hope, are obvious. I've been testing nightly's for the last while and are currently using version 1.0+ (20050803) while I write this. I should mention, it may seem like I want Thunderbird to be NetNewsWire. I don't. I want Thunderbird to be better than NetNewsWire.

1. Drag and Drop

Basic/Core Functionality:

Drag and Drop should be almost universal throughout Thunderbird, and it very nearly is, however some shortcomings are very obvious in the News and Blogs component. Thunderbird needs to be able to reorder RSS feeds and RSS feed folders into any way the user wants them configured.

At a basic level, it would be great if users could reorder individual feeds along self-organised lines: As an example, perhaps the user wants a hierarchy of most favoured or most frequently checked feeds (or folder of feeds) at the top to the least accessed at the bottom. I think the most obvious parallel is the organisation of browser bookmarks. Each individual feed should be able to be reordered in the main window hierarchy via drag and drop.

Advanced Drag and Drop Functionality:

To take the bookmark analogy further, the inclusion of separater components between feeds and/or folders would be a great feature. Thus, the user could further divide feeds into different categories. For the true RSS sophisticate, the inclusion of meta-group folders/master categories would be great.

The idea would be to have a category folder with a new kind of icon and perhaps a bold font indicating the category of the feed with it's contents being collapsible. Both of the above would mean a couple of different means to organize what can be literally hundreds of individual feeds and save the user scrolling for miles to find individual feeds. This also seems more intuitive than creating multiple News and Blogs accounts.

2. When Is A Folder Really A Folder?

My biggest complaint about the Blogs and News component has been my experience importing via .OPML files (Sage and NNW) and the subsequent confusion over a feed and a folder. The icons are virtually indistinguishable in the main window, and upon initial importing the file/folder relationship is blurry. The user usually expects folders with contents to usually have an expand/collapse arrow widget to the left of it's identifying name. I only discovered that the individual feed was in fact a folder by pulling up the manage subscriptions window and seeing there was an additional layer.

Whether i'm using Thunderbird in entirely the wrong way (quite possibly), it's a peculiar task to have to go through and take the individual feed out of the enclosing folder into a newly named or renamed folder and then have to tell it you would like it checked when updating your feeds via another drop sheet. I should mention that shuffling feeds between folders/enclosures has been problematic on this particular version, for some reason nested feeds are not being updated.

3. UI and Functionality

At the moment I feel like Thunderbird UI functionality is in a bind: The main window is too heavily reliant on the contextual menu for basic editing, or you use the manage subscriptions panel which doesn't seem to go far enough. For example, why can't the user remove a folder containing a feed using the remove button or hitting the delete key? Why can't the user edit the name of a folder containing a feed with the edit button or single-clicking it's title?

I'd love to see Thunderbird remove the 'manage subscriptions'/'RSS Subscriptions' panel entirely and instigate a Command-I key combination for feeds in the main window, which usually gives the user editing functionality similar to Thunderbird's already instigated 'Properties' from the contextual menu. My reasoning for removing the panel is simply that the panel adds an extra level of abstraction to something the user already sees in the main window.

If Thunderbird Devs are really keen on keeping the 'manage subscriptions'/'RSS Subscriptions' panel, could I please suggest that along with Command-I for feeds in the main window, Shift-Click, Command-A and Command-Click functionality should be included. The ability to select grouped or different individual feeds for a new window, editing or deletion is indispensable. Ideally i'd love to see this implemented for the main window, but if everyone is committed to the panel then please include this functionality there.

[To be continued]

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