🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Firth <filter@firthcom.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Alan Guest <alan@macropolis.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> [MacSoup]
> > Only problem is bad support for attachments and no
> > full newsgroup list means that you need to know the name of where you
> > wnat to go before you can go.
> 
> Err, Special/Show List of All Groups works just fine and you can drag
> and drop between the list of all groups and the MacSoup settings window.
> You can also search the list of all groups using MacSoup's rather
> execellent Find... function.
> 
> As to the support for attachments... well it doesn't have M$ "kitsch"
> display of an icon for an atachment, but it works just fine, without
> turning MacSoup into a memory hogging monster.
> 
> -- 
> Steve Firth                . Iron Law of Distribution: Them that has,
>   ukm@firthcom.demon.co.uk . gets.
> Message and .sig (c) 1998  . 
> $500 to reproduce either.  . 

OK. I did write the 'cons' of MacSoup without checking the facts. It
does have a full newsgroup listing as you say but mine has always been
dimmed in the menu as I have never asked it to download a list of all
groups. Why it can't download a list at first connection to the news
server as Netscape and IE do seems beyond me. Your second comment
however sounds like 'I like being techy for the sake of it". If you're
trying to tell me that receiving loads of hexadecimal in a text file is
the ideal way of receiving attachments then I find it difficult to
believe that you are a Mac user. A small icon and a bit of code to hide
all that shit isn't going to bust the memory bank. 
Without being partisan or biased (I'm certainly not a Microsoft fan) I
would say that MacSoup is an efficient, well written piece of software
that suffers from a poor interface as opposed to IE/Outlook Express
which is quite a badly written piece of software with a good interface.
I've searched all over in menus and prefs in MacSoup to find things that
I needed and it's not that I'm some sort of muppet. I use software
ranging from Quark to Photoshop, Windows NT to IRIX. If it's a two month
learning curve for a bit of newreading software then it must have a bad
interface. I use email and news as an extension of my usual work. I
don't have time to persevere with a bad interface/bad programming which
is why I ditched the idea of using Outlook for reading news after 1 day.

Despite not being a big Microsoft fan, I have to hand it to them for the
way they have developed IE. As a case study of how to develop software
it is a fine example. A couple of years ago explorer appeared as what
may have been mistaken as a bit of badly written shareware and has added
a long list of functionality to it. In true Microsoft style some of the
functionality doesn't function but it does show what can be done to
software in a couple of years. Why is it then that we have to pay �100
for an upgrade for a fraction of the functionality a free piece of
software has had added in the same space of time?

Ideally, I would like Cyberdog without the OpenDoc (which I thought was
a disaster) and some of the extra functionality offered in Outlook by
Contacts and Rules, with the offline capabilities, speed and efficiency
of MacSoup. I don't think I'll ever get that but I can always dream.


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