Celeste

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Fri Jan 16 21:30:41 UTC 2004


danielv at netvision.net.il wrote:
> ScaffoldingCeleste doesn't really work. For example, the cmd-s keyboard
> shortcut for subject filter walks back. We should either fix it, or not
> make it the default.

Heh, "Scaffolding" and "cmd-s keyboard shortcut" are funny to see in the
same sentence.  Yes, someone should fix this bug.  Volunteers?  The
debug window should make it clear what is going wrong....  



> Also, I wonder how people actually use the FC GUI. With it I find it
> quite tedious to get into the new category every time, and then to exit
> it to check the .tosend. or .spam. categories which I occaisonally wish
> to look at. It seems like a big deficiency to me, maybe I'm just using
> it wrong... or maybe I just need to add some keyboard shortcuts.

I bet you are mainly missing the keyboard shortcuts, which will change
the feel though probably not the actual time required.  If you want to
try and come up with good keyboard interactivity for Celeste, then go
for it.  Open season!  Is anyone else really using keyboard shortcuts in
Celeste?

Still, by wallclock time, switching to categories is extremely fast with
the mouse, probably faster than in the classic UI where you have to
scroll through a list in a tiny pane.  Have you noticed that "modify
this filter" is at the top of the menu in the filter pane?  This menu
item is very useful for changing categories quickly in FC.

Some other tips:

	- use multiple windows.  I generally have at least two windows open,
and leave one of them looking at "new" messages.

	- leave your window open when you snapshot.  Whenever you start an
image, open Celeste's will reload themselves if necessary.  (If locking
were available, then this could be even more robust....)


Finally, two design notes.

First, I really dislike the list of categories being everpresent in the
classic UI.  It's a lot of screen space used for a relatively infrequent
operation, and it doesn't even seem to speed things up.

Second, I find categories relatively unhelpful compared to searches on
participants and subjects.  About the only categories that stay accurate
are "new", "trash", and "tosend".  The others are hit and miss, and over
time I less frequently bother with them since searching participants and
subjects is so easy.  Interestingly, categories thus seem better suited
for automatic tagging by the mailer, than for manual categorization.


Hey, you mention category ".spam.".  Do you have a spam filter running? 
There is not one in the main distributed package, but it would be nice
if there were.  What did you do to get it working?


-Lex



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