WM6 Bugs: The Delete Command

[Jerry Raia]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=4216' target='_blank'>http://www.pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=4216</a><br /><br /></div><i>"In the new Windows Mobile 6 Professional, the menus for the Messaging application have been changed a bit. The most obvious is that the left softkey has been changed from “New” to “Delete”. The reasoning behind this is that most people have to delete a lot of spam on their phones and they wanted to make deleting messages easier. I don’t know who was surveyed for that data, but in my opinion, this was not thought out very well at all. Personally, I never delete messages on my phone."</i><br /><br />Since I have yet to get my hands on a WM6 device I cant say if this would bother me or not. I'm not sure why it is being called a bug here though. I thought everything was a "feature". :lol:

[11244]

I love that function.

Im getting more than 30 spam messages a day and i believe they did the right thing.

You recieve more messages than you send normally.

//11244

[rancyland]

Ditto - my Dash is on its way to Houston for a display replacement (d'oh!) and I'm back to my SDA - I miss that Delete soft key more than I thought I would.

[Hyer]

I like the delet key as well, the one that bugs me is the right softkey on the home screen defaults to contacts. Well if your looking for contact from the home screen you just start inputing their name to do the search, so I never use the softkey. It should be configurable, I for one would much rather it link to my email, I am sick of scrolling all the way down to get to email!

[Jerry Raia]

The keys should be user configurable. Then we could have it how we want it. What a concept! :roll:

[applejosh]

I think it would bug me. I rarely delete email using my device (most of the time I'm onsite connected to OWA). Plus my email address isn't a spam target yet, and I think my company utilizes two spam filters anyway (one is the IMF in Exchange and the second one I think is a spam service). I can see where if someone uses their device almost exclusively, is rarely at their desktop, and has no spam filtering capabilities that this would be useful. But as Jerry said, user configurable would be the ideal solution.

[scottb]

Although I tend to use the Delete function more than the New function, I don't see the advantage. It still take two keypresses to delete.

[craigrens]

Although I tend to use the Delete function more than the New function, I don't see the advantage. It still take two keypresses to delete.

You can change the setting to immediately delete rather than prompt in WM6 on the Dash.

I'm with the configurable would be nice. However, I delete a great deal more e-mails than I create new ones...so I'm happy with the current option.

[nutzareus]

One-step delete in WM6 is much better than two-step delete in WM5! :clap: Even though I have spam filtering on Exchange, it's great to be able to quickly delete messages.

[vincenzosi]

The keys should be user configurable. Then we could have it how we want it. What a concept! :roll:

My thought's exactly.

Seriously, why isn't it? When you think about how much easier that would make life...

Anyway, yes, Jerry, I agree wholeheartedly.

[nutzareus]

The keys should be user configurable. Then we could have it how we want it. What a concept! :roll:

Why isn't it user-configurable? Because we programmers would get killed for writing "bloated" code! :roll: For example, the left button is now simply hard-wired to fire the delete function. Pretty simple and straight-forward. Now, you want it configurable? No problem, now you just made it alot more complex by adding a switch statement when the button is pushed because now we need to create an extra event to look in the registry and find out what you customized the button to do, then based on the command you customized it to do, handle that event. How many customized commands are we talking here? Are you allowed to create your own customized commands? You can't have the cake and eat it too! :evil:

For crying out loud, are people making a mountain from a mole hill for this? I was GLAD the one-step delete was implemented. Not to mention a much easier method to empty the deleted folder! I was wondering who designed the original UI where it took 2 steps to delete and a gazillion steps to empty the deleted folder. The person who designed that in WM5 and older should have been fired. The WM6 interface is much more useful, IMHO.

[vincenzosi]

Sorry but I don't see how this automatically bloats the code.

Those two softkeys should be customizable simply because if you asked 20 people, they use their phones 20 different ways.

The idea that this would involve bloating code is ludicrous.

[Kris Kumar]

I would like to give Microsoft some credit. When you are viewing the mail message the left key defaults to Reply and when in the list view it is Delete. I think they put some thought. If I open an email and while reading I feel like responding, I can hit the left key. Otherwise in the mail listing, I am always during purge. I never reply by just the message title. I reply to the email while viewing the item.

Plus I love this feature, my Hotmail account gets only spam, this helps me purge it.

[nutzareus]

The idea that this would involve bloating code is ludicrous.

I suppose writing a code module for a control panel-like applet to customize your buttons would not qualify as bloated code? That's alot of lines of code and alot of extra paths for a program to take. Remember, this is just for customizing ONE button... DELETE!

[heliod]

I agree that keys could be configurable, but we have to think about the influence that would have on the OS footprint and performance. It is not always easy to implement the same concepts of the computer on a phone these days. Maybe in the future.

To the point of the question, if I need to account the ratio of deleting messages to creating new messages, in my case it would be around 8:1 for deleting messages. So at least in my case, MS has caught exactly the right function to put in the softkey, and I am happy they did the change.

Helio

[Tim Williamson]

The keys should be user configurable. Then we could have it how we want it. What a concept! :roll:

QFT! But I do like having the delete softkey in messaging.

[scottb]

Although I tend to use the Delete function more than the New function, I don't see the advantage. It still take two keypresses to delete.

You can change the setting to immediately delete rather than prompt in WM6 on the Dash...
Ah, thanks. That does make a difference.

[encece]

Nutzareus...do you work for MS? As your first instict is NOT to listen to the end user? :)

Configuring the key is a great idea! But if I were to personalize it...I'd have it mapped to DELETE!!!! ;)

[bshpmark]

Given the fact that WM6 now allows me to choose to keep my messages on the server after retrieving them, I like the new delete key. It took a day or two to get used to it, but now I am quite happy with it. Before, in WM5, I never deleted anything because it may be something I wanted to keep for when I got home or to the office and if I delted it by accident, bye bye on the server.

[onlydarksets]

For someone who uses this for his work account (Exchange server), taking away the 1-click "New" button is a horrible decision. I never get spam on my work account, so I rarely do mass-deletes. I do, however, send a lot of emails from my Smartphone. This is just one more step to go through... :( It really should be configurable, since it represents a pretty big change for how the inbox works. Nice job, yet again, MS.

[Janak Parekh]

I suppose writing a code module for a control panel-like applet to customize your buttons would not qualify as bloated code? That's alot of lines of code and alot of extra paths for a program to take. Remember, this is just for customizing ONE button... DELETE!
Sorry, but as a professional software engineer, I disagree with this one. Sure, it'll add code, but it's nowhere near "complicated", considering the kinds of tasks the messaging applet does. I haven't done WM programming extensively, but in a typical graphical environment, you'd add a few lines of code to read an additional user preference (the code to read preferences from the registry is already there), make one single control-flow decision, and register a callback and update the softkey's label. Thereon, during the runtime of the application, there would be zero cost performancewise. As for an extra option in the user preferences, that's pretty minimal, too.

A much better question is if it is a development priority to add such a feature. That is the true cost, not the processing power of adding a little control-flow logic. For instance (and I think you mentioned this earlier): if the left key should be customizable, which features should be allowed? Surprisingly, such things end up being a lot more complex than they seem at first. That said, since they switched the functionality from one to the other, I'd personally have preferred they add at least one boolean registry setting to allow the old functionality to remain.

Incidentally: a much more difficult, and cooler problem, would be to enable the setting of softkeys at the operating system level. This is far harder since not all applications use the softkeys for the same tasks, and even in the middle of one application the softkeys' behavior change.

--janak