Pandora needs a message editing toolbar like Eudora's (and navigating long item selection lists)

Pandora's creator Brana Bujenovic has done a fine job in morphing Eudora into Pandora Mail, significantly modernising and enhancing features while doing so.

I'm getting quite excited about Pandora, and in this blog I'll continue to document my findings and opinions and invite readers' comments so that together we can make Pandora better and better over time.

I hope (and expect) that Brana won't be put off by my findings and opinions, all documented in this blog with the aim of making positive suggestions. To be frank, in my first year of being an octogenarian I'd rather be doing something else! But I will keep making the effort to provide a meaning contribution!

This post is about one of the fundamental aspects of e-mail, namely, the creation and editing of message content. Specifically, it's about the very basic aspects of content editing rather than the more intricate aspects, the simpler editing controls that we use for the bulk of message content (a.k.a. the 80/20 rule).

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I was prompted to write about this as soon as I started creating messages in Pandora. I just couldn't find a quick and easy way to -– of all things –- perform the basic function of choosing different font sizes.

Here's an example of selecting text size from the message editing toolbar (or whatever it's called) in Eudora. It's convenient and easy to use for operating with the commonest message content editing options:

I'm quite surprised that Pandora doesn't seem to have such a toolbar, at least I couldn't find one. All content editing in Pandora seems to have to be done via pull-down  Edit Menu selections (at the very top) or via context menu (right mouse click) selections in the body of the message:

I'm finding that my basic content creation and updating is noticeably slowed down by only having the drop-down or context menu approach.

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In the second screenshot, I make the additional observation that there are various places in Pandora where you're presented with long lists of items that you're have to scroll through vertically, and I find this scrolling to be painfully slow and cumbersome.

Then,  you have scrolled way down a list (for example, choosing Verdana font) and next time you want to choose a different item from the list (say, Arial font) then you have to laboriously scroll all the way back up through the list). On my system, which is reasonably powerful, it takes at least twenty seconds to scroll from one end to the other of the Text Color list.

Eudora (and various other apps) display such long lists in multi-column format like the following, lightly blurred to protect the innocent. The list items might get rendered to the left or to the right, dependent on screen real estate positioning In the following example (transfer of a message to one of my many mailboxes) it's rendered to the left:

Selecting an item is much easier/faster using this approach.