Re: Nota Bene and writing emails

["R Tennenbaum" raphaelt@xxxxxxxx]

On Wed, 8 Dec 1999 00:40:35 +0000, Carl Distefano wrote:

>
>Reply to note from Bob Zimmerman  Tue, 7 Dec
>1999 01:03:50 -0500
>
>-> Making it possible to write emails in Xywrite seems to be a
>-> problem that a number of us Xywrite users have. ...
>
>Bob's heroic (and, apparently, largely successful) effort to get
>Eudora "talking" with Nota Bene prompts the following observation,
>which I find self-evident and which I hereby nail to the cathedral
>door:
>
>The ability to send and receive documents electronically has become
>as essential to modern writing as the ability to print. Therefore,
>a truly modern word-processor must have integrated email.
>
>I'm speaking not only of the convenience of using familiar
>keystrokes and powerful editing functions to create messages --
>important as that is. More than that, once a document is written,
>one should have the options -- without leaving the current screen --
>of sending it as plain text or as a formatted (encoded) document.


Well, yes & no, imho.

When I think about using my 'pute productively, it ends up being
about plumbing. Having used nearly all the computers and
applications and opsyses out there in one shape or another, I've
(we've) finally decided we don't want one that does things
automatically for us, it must be tailorable to our needs. As
importantly, when something breaks down, I want to be able to fix
it myself: having the various operations separate, but joinable via
hooks, batchfiles, and manual operation, makes it that much simpler
to debug things when they get screwed up.

It happens that OS/2 and XyWrite and the Xy-OS/2 machinery do this
superbly, for me anyway. What's so neat is that with Xy, we're all
using batchfiles and routines we haven't changed since Day 14, or
128, or 3459. And strangely, or by design, or some miraculous
synchronism, the demands of the task end up sort of mimicking how
they're performed. Eg, I'd like the composition of my emails to be
a separate task from their sending, so most of the important ones I
write in a Xy box, then define, then ctrl-ins, and then shift-ins
into a PMMail window. Having things separated this way lets me
make sure I'm sending it to the right person, lets me proof it, and
finally once it's sent, puts it somewhere where I've set all kinds
of archiving and searching tools in place, within easy GUI reach.

I must say, when I see the inability of these Windows applications
to contend with something as trivial (albeit as noisomely
vestigial) as an EOF marker, it just confirms in me the sense that
this kind of program behavior can hardly be accidental. Unless
someone can prove to me otherwise, there's absolutely no sensible
reason any application should puke when it encounters an EOF, and
paranoid as I am, I end up assuming that this was designed into the
thing. Just as I believe that the reason future versions of
Windows will -- so we've been told -- be designed to prevent the
kind of DOS-session spawning that Xy-OS/2 does so seamlessly, is to
ensure that only monolithic W applications will then be useable.

To get back to plumbing, I don't know how the whole convention of
pipes and water/waste transport evolved, but I do know it's not at
all a bad thing that pipes are fitted and joined, because it makes
replacing defective parts that much simpler. Even if it were
possible to cast the whole water intake of a house in one piece,
cheaply, even how desireable would this be?  It would be that much
less feasible to isolate the problem inside the house from a
problem with the flow coming from outside -- better to have valves
to shut off and joints to loosen. That way, nothing nasty can get
into the pipes and shake the whole foundation loose.

Well, I didn't really answer your thesis, Carl, but there was room
on the other door.

Rafe T.
http://www-ray-field.com