Search All of the Math Forum:
Views expressed in these public forums are not endorsed by
Drexel University or The Math Forum.
|
|
|
|
Re: posting pictures?
Posted:
Sep 18, 1993 4:08 PM
|
|
In article <27cmno$pgc@forum.swarthmore.edu>, Tom McDougal
<mcdougal@cs.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> Why did it seem better to rewrite from scratch? I might have thought
> that Nuntius would be a reasonable platform on which to build a
> newsreader-with-pictures, since already it makes use of external
> programs for editing articles and has code for extracting binaries.
Tom,
We did look at Nuntius, and we thought about adding MIME support to it, but
we found that there were some things about the interface that were
confusing to novice users. Since we are trying especially to encourage
high-school and elementary-school teachers and students to get on the
Forum, and most of them have no experience with newsreaders and some have
little experience with computers, the interface issues seem to us to be
very important.
The things that we noticed in particular were that people's inclination was
to read from the list of all groups (especially when they were reading from
our server, which only carries around 12 groups), and they were confused
when Nuntius didn't mark articles read. Also, I think many novice Mac
users are confused by having multiple applications running at the same
time, which Nuntius does quite a bit of. Our reader is going to give users
the option of using separate editors and mailers, but will also include
(minimal) integrated ones so people aren't forced to switch between apps.
> Source code is available. The author might also have been willing to
> assist.
We have looked at the source code for Nuntius quite a bit and it has been
very helpful.
-Asa
--
Asa Packer
The Geometry Forum
Swarthmore College
|
|
|
|
