Software feature request:
I would like the little [-] button which collapses a subthread to be duplicated in some form at the bottom of that thread. The use is that when a thread looks like this:
comment A
comment B
...really long thread...
comment C
and I am looking at comment C, I can click the new thingy on the bottom edge of comment B’s thread to collapse it and bring A in visual proximity to C. It is of course possible to scroll up and count box borders, or follow C’s permalink and do ‘show context’, but these are both tedious.
(Then there’s export to NNTP so that I could use a decent desktop UI for threaded reading. Or my ‘hyperbolic threading’ idea which I haven’t gotten around to writing the web prototype of.)
Then there’s export to NNTP so that I could use a decent desktop UI for threaded reading. Or my ‘hyperbolic threading’ idea which I haven’t gotten around to writing the web prototype of.
There’s desktop apps for threaded reading? New to me.
The one I used back when I was still on Usenet was MacSOUP.
It presents a single thread in a two-paned window; the top pane contains a graphical tree (replies rightward, siblings downward) of messages, highlighting unread/read, your own posts, and marked-interesting-or-worthless subthreads, and the bottom pane contains the current message. Furthermore, it’s an offline reader, so every message is pre-downloaded; hit the spacebar and you are at the next message instantaneously.
While it never showed more than one message at a time (being Usenet, there were usually quotes anyway), the thread tree (which could be navigated by keyboard) combined with the speed of navigation was very effective at letting one understand the complete structure of a discussion.
I really hope that the blogs-and-feeds crowd gets threading implemented and someone writes an app like this for Atom/RSS/web pages, so that I can have that system again but with modernization of the other aspects.
Software feature request: I would like the little [-] button which collapses a subthread to be duplicated in some form at the bottom of that thread. The use is that when a thread looks like this:
and I am looking at comment C, I can click the new thingy on the bottom edge of comment B’s thread to collapse it and bring A in visual proximity to C. It is of course possible to scroll up and count box borders, or follow C’s permalink and do ‘show context’, but these are both tedious.
(Then there’s export to NNTP so that I could use a decent desktop UI for threaded reading. Or my ‘hyperbolic threading’ idea which I haven’t gotten around to writing the web prototype of.)
There’s desktop apps for threaded reading? New to me.
The one I used back when I was still on Usenet was MacSOUP.
It presents a single thread in a two-paned window; the top pane contains a graphical tree (replies rightward, siblings downward) of messages, highlighting unread/read, your own posts, and marked-interesting-or-worthless subthreads, and the bottom pane contains the current message. Furthermore, it’s an offline reader, so every message is pre-downloaded; hit the spacebar and you are at the next message instantaneously.
While it never showed more than one message at a time (being Usenet, there were usually quotes anyway), the thread tree (which could be navigated by keyboard) combined with the speed of navigation was very effective at letting one understand the complete structure of a discussion.
I really hope that the blogs-and-feeds crowd gets threading implemented and someone writes an app like this for Atom/RSS/web pages, so that I can have that system again but with modernization of the other aspects.