Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha

Sylpheed-Claws has hit 1.9.14 and with an astounding amount of updates, fixes, and new goodies!

From a UI perspective, it contains three big improvements worth mentioning:

• Colourisation of quotes, signatures and URIs in Compose window. If you’ve ever read an email that shows you different colours for different ages of quoted text, you’ll realise that the moment you take this concept to the compose window, the intuitiveness and ease of replying increases manifold. Having it colour coded makes identification of various levels/ages of the message so fast and easy, once you start using it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it!
• Subfolders of Drafts, Queue, Sent, and Trash now behave like their parents. You could always create subfolders to these special folders but they always behaved like regular folders. For example, if you saved a draft of a message and moved it to a sub-folder of Draft, you could not double-click it and resume editing. Now you can. It makes sense to work like this, and now it does.
• Filtering and Processing rules can be named. One of the things many people perhaps had problems with was that after creating rules, SC showed them exactly like that: rules. If you had two similar rules with subtle differences, you would either need to remember which one was which or open them up to verify. Now, you can simply assign an easy-to-remember name to each rule and drink some hot chocolate that will look good with that smile you’ll have when you do.

There are many other UI related small updates and fixes (some of them important) in this release among a host of other things. I’m so hoping Thorsten comes back soon and releases a Win32 build of it. 😉

Sidenote: Colin bought a new laptop after his iBook had a bath. And because of that:

* tools/asus_mailled.sh
A new script to blink an ASUS laptop’s mail LED when there is unread mail.

Now you know which one he bought. 😉