Mulberry 3.0 client demo
Presenter: Laura Valentine, Consultant, Computing Services

What's Changed From Mulberry 2?

The most noticeable changes for people who have used Mulberry before are the three-paned window and the tabs.

The three-paned window contains

    * A pane with two tabs, Mail and Contacts. The Mail pane is similar to the old Server window; it lists your accounts and mailboxes. The Contacts tab contains address books.
    * A pane with your open mailboxes as tabs. This helps keep the open mailboxes organized and accessible.
    * A preview pane, showing the selected message in each open mailbox

There are a couple things to be careful of in 3.0.

    Removing a Display Hierarchy:
    When you are removing a Display Hierarchy, you need to make sure that none of the mailboxes in the hierarchy are currently open. If they are, Mulberry may crash when you switch away from them or when you quit the program.

    Changing your tab and pane setup:
    Although the tab and pane information is stored in your online preferences, it cannot be accessed from the Preferences. In order to change it, you need to go to the Window menu. "Layout" lets you rearrange the panes; "Options..." lets you turn the tabs off and on, and change other options for your panes.

    Opening Too Many Tabs:
    On Mulberry for the Macintosh, you can open too many tabs and make tabs disappear from your screen. You can see the missing tabs again by closing some mailbox tabs and then clicking on one of the missing mailboxes in the Mail pane.

    On Mulberry for Windows, you will get scroll buttons to move through the extra tabs.

    Search Results in Wrong Window:
    If you double-click a mailbox to open it, it opens both a tab for the mailbox and a separate window. If you search the mailbox from the window, results will show up in the tab; the window itself will not change.

    Missing Toggle Button:
    On Mulberry for Windows, the toggle button that changes between a flat hierarchy view and a nested one is missing. On Mulberry for Macintosh, it is still there. Cyrusoft is working on a fix for this.

    Ongoing Work with Cyrusoft/HCII:
    Over the past few months, we have collected an up-to-date list of Mulberry bugs, and Joel has taken this list to Cyrusoft, along with the user interface issues that you helped me collect. We are also working with Cyrusoft and a group of HCII grad students to try to improve the Mulberry interface in the future.

    Release Plan:
    Currently, we have decided to wait for the release of Mulberry 3.01, to see if any of our major issues have been addressed. It is supposed to be released by the end of this week; if it is, we plan to spend two weeks or so testing it.