Indeed.  As much as I love Thunderbird, Firefox, Inkscape and other 
open-source projects, they are mainly by geeks to geeks.  There's no 
excuse for a lack of builtin signature textbox editor.

BTW, one recent issue with the forthcoming inkscape 0.46 has been that 
the Windows version wasn't printing.  Yep, no print functionality for 
the Windows version.  And it's not a problem with the project itself, 
which is Linux geared and where printing works fine, but just to the 
Windows port, which is not maintained by the core developers, but by 
volunteers commited to the platform.  Despite the port being obviously 
more popular than the original, just for the sheer amount of users. 
Anyway, it's not really a problem with inkscape per se, but with one of 
its main dependencies, cairo.

Geeks-to-geeks.  Should be 
geeks-to-idiots-who-don't-know-difference-between-formatting-and-writting.

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> Indeed.  As much as I love Thunderbird, Firefox, Inkscape and other 
> open-source projects, they are mainly by geeks to geeks.  There's no 
> excuse for a lack of builtin signature textbox editor.

meh, thunderbird sucks. Even Outlook Express had way better newsgroup 
handling. Thunderbird doesn't keep a cache at all. You have two options: 
get messages deleted from the cache shortly after you read them, or 
download ALL the damned messages of the newsgroup. You can't make it 
cache what you already saw and only what you already saw.

Also, it has a horrible way to handle messages with attachments. It 
seems to first download the whole message, attachments included. Shows 
only text. Then for each attachment present, it re-downloads the whole 
message again...

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> meh, thunderbird sucks. Even Outlook Express had way better newsgroup 
> handling. Thunderbird doesn't keep a cache at all. You have two options: 
> get messages deleted from the cache shortly after you read them, or 
> download ALL the damned messages of the newsgroup. You can't make it 
> cache what you already saw and only what you already saw.
> 
> Also, it has a horrible way to handle messages with attachments. It 
> seems to first download the whole message, attachments included. Shows 
> only text. Then for each attachment present, it re-downloads the whole 
> message again...

It does, however, have a number of useful features.

It wraps text *in the compose window*, so you can see what it will look 
like when posted. Text written between stars comes out in bold. 
Superscripts work. [and other misc features] It has [some] emoticons. 
It's doesn't top-post.

OTOH, the compose editor is rather buggy, especially regarding quoted 
text. (Especially if it's in HTML mode!) And you have to utter voodoo 
enchantments to make the spell checker work properly.

And how could anyone forget - IT WON'T THREAD MESSAGES CORRECTLY!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
> And how could anyone forget - IT WON'T THREAD MESSAGES CORRECTLY!

<Warp> You should demand your money back. </Warp>


;-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Darren New wrote:

> </Warp>

"End Warp"?

This concept appeals to me...

> ;-)

...indeed.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> 
>> </Warp>
> 
> "End Warp"?

It means you're now operating like a standard User :o

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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> 47d93f4d$1@news.povray.org...
>> BTW, the little story wasn't about "how stupid are users" but rather how
>> I, inconsciously, thought that "text file" was equal to "ascii" for
>> anyone (which is natural and obvious for geeks).  I can't say she's wrong
>> if she thinks "text file" == ".doc", of course.
> 
> Also, if she was coming from a corporate environment, it's quite possible 
> that she was using Word as an email editor, including Word's built-in 
> signature editor.

They do very surprising things, in corporate environments !

In fact, people in geek-less environments tend to do very surprising things,
it seems.

Most architectural firms around here uses PhotoShop (the free version, which
comes on a CD-R) to crop and resize Jpegs...

I'm somewhat distorted, because 1) I've never worked in another place than
my current one, and 2) the local geek, that's me !

latest news :
Yesterday, I've discovered that, although she wrote a thesis and numerous
wordprocessing stuff, as a student and during her first work experience,
she didn't knew about "search and replace" feature. Ah, reality...
(it seems that, today, she discovered the TAB key,...)

Fabien.

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> It does, however, have a number of useful features.
> 
> It wraps text *in the compose window*, so you can see what it will look 
> like when posted. Text written between stars comes out in bold. 
> Superscripts work. [and other misc features] It has [some] emoticons. 
> It's doesn't top-post.

For myself, TB's "killer" feature, might it seem ridiculous, is "edit as new mail",
which can be performed on mail you sent or received; saves a lot of dirty
copy-paste when I send almost-the-same-mail-with-two-words-changed.

Fabien.

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> (it seems that, today, she discovered the TAB key,...)

And yesterday I discovered a few shortcuts I didn't know. F4 opens a 
dropdown menu (I knew this one, but hadn't used it for a long while). In 
CHM help viewer, F6 changes focus between the sidebar (with search, 
contents, etc) and the actual content. In Firefox, Ctrl + and Ctrl - not 
only change font size, but also change between full and "fit to screen" 
when you're viewing a big image directly. Ctrl-T on mIRC changes focus 
to the list of channels (treeview).

Easy method for finding all this. I unplugged my mouse for an hour. You 
should try it with your colleague just to have some fun >:)

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> F4 opens a dropdown menu.

So it *is* possible?! I *knew* it...

Why is this stuff not written down anywhere?

> Easy method for finding all this. I unplugged my mouse for an hour. You 
> should try it with your colleague just to have some fun >:)

I spent a day trying to set up this new Dell PC. However, it has no PS/2 
ports, so my KVM switch wouldn't work. The guy watching me thought it 
was terribly amusing each time I tried to use the PS/2 keyboard to 
control it, instead of the USB one sat beside me. GRRR!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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