[dev] Sidebar organization changes

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:

> Quoting Jan Schneider <jan at horde.org>:
>
>>> - Move Newsgroups (Troll) into the Information category
>>
>> No, news group reading is part of all major mail clients, and even
>> several OS file new readers under Internet but never under Information.
>
> Seems to be disagreement on this one. Maybe we need an Internet
> category instead of some of what we have?

Just to comment on Jan's comment - while true that many mail programs 
also can handle news (think Netscape, pine, etc.), I'm thinking this is 
more a matter of programming convenience rather than something that is 
intuitive to the user. me, as a user, doesn't normally read mail and go 
"boy, it would be great if I had newsgroups with this!"  Instead, I 
think programmers simply realized that most of the backend programming 
functionality needed for a newsgroup reader is already available in a 
mail reader so it takes little effort to add newsgroups.  This is 
exactly true with troll.  It uses all sorts of stuff originally written 
for IMP (i.e. IMAP_Tree, MIME_Viewer, MIME_Header), and uses the same 
backend-engine we already require for IMP (c-client).  Therefore, troll 
(with 10,000% less development time than IMP) is still usable software 
because it does borrow so heavily from previously existing code.  But 
just because it borrows code from a programmer's perspective, i don't 
believe this transfers into an "obvious relationship" between Mail and 
News for the lay user.

I can't tell you how many times I have clicked on the agora icon 
thinking it was troll, and then when troll didn't come up spending a 
good amount of time trying to figure out where newsgroups are located.  
And every time looking in mail last, finding newsgroups, and wondering 
to myself "what the heck is it doing in here".  but this is just the 
personal experience of a forgetful user i guess :)

so whether it goes in "information" or "internet" i don't care.

michael

_______________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at curecanti.org]