[MlMt] Layouts with Non-Columnar Formatting

[Gary Hull]

On 2 Dec 2015, at 0:15, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> There's a chance, but I haven't done any work on it yet (and it's a 
> major change/feature).

The reason that this occurred to me is that I was reading a detailed 
review of Macintosh mail applications where MailMate was declared "The 
Best Third-Party Email Client for Power Users," which in this case was 
sort of the bronze medal, since a couple of other apps were recommended 
for normal people:

http://thesweetsetup.com/apps/favorite-email-client-os-x/

The review at one point says, "The interface is very functional, but 
also pretty boring. If looks are important to you, you won’t like 
MailMate."

I decided to take a close look at the two apps also reviewed as well as 
the Apple Mail app to see exactly how they were considered better 
designed. And in the end I think it's 80 percent the fact that the 
designers were not constricted by the spreadsheet limitation in the mail 
list. If users could do a sort of CSS style spec in designing that, they 
could duplicate most of the different things these other apps are doing. 
It might also help to add the ability to change a few things like white 
space (margins, leading) and font and icon stuff in the other panels, 
but it's mostly that mail list panel.

So it seems to me that you could do away with "functional, but boring" 
reviews by liberalizing the degree to which customization could be done. 
At that point people would have the tools to mimic whatever design they 
like. Or switch among designs weekly. MailMate could become the mail 
application for people for whom "looks are important," so important that 
they want to do it themselves or choose among several well-designed 
variations.