🚀 go-pugleaf

In <8465@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>, ack@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Andy J. Williams) said:  
>I am writing a rather large BBS package for use on our Appletalk Network
>here at Dartmouth College and I would like a little advice.  The program
>will be a Macintosh front end to a VPL1 Server running on a mainframe here.
>The Server will contain
>
>     All the netnews groups we receive (circa 200-300 last count)
>     All the newsgroups which will be read locally
>     and maybe a Finger User option and a conference system.
>
>The big problem has been designing a user interface which presents, say, 300
>newsgroups to the user in a very simple form that even a complete neophyte
>can understand and know what to do (Intuitive programming)  

Hmmm...  I've been thinking that when (and if) I get uucp up and running on
my mac, I'll want a user interface to choose what netnews groups to read.
While reading your posting, I got an idea:

In a menu somewhere (be it a pop up from a configure dialog that allowed
you to set things like kill files, etc., or from a pull down that's located
on the menu bar) you have the entire list of groups available.  The user will
have to be able to scan the list at some point, and breaking it up in this
fashion seems reasonable.  Items that were marked for reading would have
a checkmark on them; items unsubscribed would have another mark by them, etc.

This full list would then feed into a second menu, which was basically your
.newsrc (the analogy holds for those who use rn to read netnews).  Unread
news would have a mark on the menu, etc.  The user could pick and choose
which groups to read by selecting them from the menu.  Alternately more
advanced users could type the names of the newsgroups in a box somewhere.
A default would be to simply cycle through the groups on the 'read list'
from top to bottom (as currently in rn).  As NewGroup messages come in,
the program would have to update the master menu list.

Somewhere in the custom WDEF would be a bunch of controls to do various
things.  One would indicate that the user wants to read the next posting
with the title of the current posting.  Another would kill all postings
with that title, etc.  One would have to pick and choose as to which
controls would be in the window.  Or, alternately, the user could customize
their interface, placing whichever controls *they* wanted to have available
at all times on their window, with the ones they didn't tend to user not
cluttering their window border.

Multiple windows are a must; with the user being able to read several
different articles at once; respond to several at once, cut & paste at will.

An ideal addition would be a parser that removes all hard <CR>s (with
some kind of hueristic to sence when <CR>s are intentional...) and format
the messages in whatever size window was desired.  Replies should be
written in whatever size window the user desired; hard <CR>s always
carried over, and <CR>s added in just before the message was sent off to
the server (unless our server could do all of this for us).  Font should
be the user's choice.

The Mail headers should be hidable from users that don't want to fuss with
them.  Ideally some interface to pathalias would exist on the server side.
However, users that want to muck with that stuff must be allowed to.  Never
*ever* assume that the computer is smarter than the user.  If by chance it
is, the user will discover it in due time.  When it's not, the user shouldn't
be forced.

As with MacTerminal, the user should be able to print selections, as well
as entire messages.  Also the user should be able to save selections  (by
selection I mean an artibrary string of text that the user selects with
the cursor by dragging over it).

A possible "behind the user's back" that might be added is saving the
headers of any message that a user saves in the resource fork of the document,
so that the user doesn't have to do that seperately in order to retain
attribution.

Selecting discontiguous text would be nice (automagically insert elipsis as
appropiate [on a new line of the skip is over a <CR>, or on the same line
if the skip doesn't cross a <CR>] so that the user doesn't have to go to
the trouble -- this option should be turn off-able).  Certainly not a
necessity in version 1.0!

Incorporating MacPaint pictures, TIFF, etc. etc. would also be nice, especially
if a lot of intra-campus messages are exchanged.  Perhaps in the "news group"
data structure you would have a boolean that indicated whether or not mac
graphics were appropiate for this group and disallow posting to "real"
newsgroups.

A vi/emacs editor would be nice for those that want it and are used to it.


And lastly, a very snazzy About box is without question the only classy
way to go on a program that does all this.


Hmmm...  and this was to be a quick note detailing some of my ideas...  Anyone
out there have anything different?  Anything you would change?


Peter "the dreamer" Korn
--
Peter "Arrgh" Korn
korn@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
{decvax,dual,hplabs,sdcsvax,ulysses}!ucbvax!korn