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From: chip@osh3.OSHA.GOV (Chip Yamasaki)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Hey Syd, here's a couple of ideas!
Message-ID: <1991Jun20.044510.781@osh3.OSHA.GOV>
Date: 20 Jun 91 04:45:10 GMT
Organization: U.S. D.O.L - Occupational Safety & Health Admin.
Lines: 48

Please! Don't anyone confuse this with a flame! I love Elm and use it
daily, but one of the managers and a user or two here has complained
about a couple of things and I'd like to make a suggestion or two. 

I looked at Cymail, that new commercial package being advertised, and
discussed it with them.  They seem to be responsive, but I ad some
complaints and have some reservations about waiting for a commercial
package to be ported to the platform I might move to someday. Therefore,
I'll look at it some more and see how the Elm community and developers
react to a suggestion or two.

Now for my users comments:

They complained that Elm doesn't have a "menu".  I'd call it a menu, but
I think what they are looking for is a point and shoot type of thing
with the current selection in reverse video and the arrow keys in
control.  Cymail even uses the Lotus-like technique of displaying a 1
liner explaining the currently highlighted option.  Nice, but I
personally like having more of the commands listed on one screen like
the expert level menu on Elm.  Maybe this other style of menu could be
and option?  Oh well, not so important.

Another complaint is no binary attachments.  I know this is easy for
those of us who are "experienced" mail users, but Cymail does have a
good approach for this too.  They make the attach action a command
separate from the composition of the message and attach the files using
uuencode when the message is sent.  Then they strip the attachments
before piping the message to the pager.  Elm could be modified easily
for this and the attachments ommand could be placed on the same menu as
the send command.  Well?

Finally, a nice touch is their editor.  I've seen lots of callsfor a
simple editor, but no great responses.  Cymail does have what seems to
be a good basic editor.  It does the basics and devotes the top four or
so lines of the screen to a list of those simple commands.  Maybe the
Elm development group could come up with something like this, or make a
suggestion of another simple editor like that in the docs to help admins
with naive users.

Another thing I have yet to see is a macro language or API for Elm. 
That would be fantastic!

Any possibility of these types of things appearing soon?
-- 
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Charles "Chip" Yamasaki| The opinions expressed here are my own and are not
chip@oshcomm.osha.gov  | supported or even generally accepted by OSHA. :-)
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