Re: Some hints for usability improvements

[Peter Bloomfield <peterbloomfield bellsouth net>]

On 01/21/2006 10:56:28 AM Sat, Mişu Moldovan wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 18:50:50 -0500
> Peter Bloomfield <peterbloomfield bellsouth net> wrote:
[ snip ]
> > We had some reports of problems with old glib/gtk  
> > installations--what versions were involved?
>
> 2.6.4/2.6.4 as included in Debian stable (aka Sarge). Balsa is  
> 2.3.8. Ok, I have just started it again and it doesn't crash  
> anymore. It crashes only when previewing a certain mail which  
> happened to be the last one in my Inbox at that time (and  
> having the preference to automatically open Inbox and  
> automatically open a mail, it crashed Balsa on startup).  I've  
> also noticed that this mail doesn't crashes the same version of  
> Balsa on a Gentoo system which has a 2.8.8 gtk and a 2.8.4  
> glib. The mail in mbox format for the curious may be downloaded  
> from:
> http://gnomero.ath.cx/signed_mail_that_crashes_Balsa.mbox.txt
> http://gnomero.ath.cx/signed_mail_that_crashes_Balsa.mbox.gz
> (just to be sure)

Thanks for making it available!  I tried it the same way (last  
message in an mbox, auto-open, auto-display) on FC4 (gtk-2.2.8,  
glib-2.8.4), and had no problem.
[ snip ]

> > Since 2.3.7, if you have GtkSpell and configure  
> > --with-gtkspell, you get, well, real spell-checking.  The  
> > spell-check option (toolbar button and menu item) becomes a  
> > toggle, and spell-checking is as-you-type. We're still working  
> > on saving the state of spell-checking when a message is saved  
> > to and continued from Drafts.
>
> Tried that and it works quite nice. Why isn't it enabled by
> default? It seems to be much better than the old spell checker.

Agreed!  So far, the default has been disabled because not  
everyone has it, and also we wanted to get some experience with  
it.  But some (all?) distros include it (Pawel enabled it in  
Fedora-extras-devel), and the experience to date is uniformly  
good.  Also, some issues about persistence and saving state in  
draft messages have now been resolved, so it may be time to  
change the default.
[ snip ]

> > > And also ask me about automatically  re-encoding to UTF-8 if  
> > > my mail contains characters not present in  the  default  
> > > encoding.
> > The current code tries quite hard to find a charset that can  
> > handle the text, but yes, it could ask for suggestions before  
> > falling back on UTF-8.
>
> Actually, I was thinking about just asking for a confirmation  
> for falling to UTF-8 when the supposed encoding (set as default  
> or set in the mail to which Balsa composed the reply) doesn't  
> fit.

My mail with some discussion about this crossed over with yours!   
One question with confirmation would be: what does Balsa do if  
the user declines to confirm?
[ snip ]

> > > 6) In both Sylpheed MUA's it's possible to set up the folder  
> > > pane to only show the folders and the number of new mails in  
> > > parantheses along  side the folder's name. No need to display  
> > > the whole list of statistics just to see how many new mails  
> > > you have in a specific IMAP sub-folder. As a side note, I got  
> > > to distrust the new status of IMAP subfolders in Balsa  
> > > especially with some (maybe broken) IMAP servers like  
> > > Exchange.
> >
> > Yes, that would be a useful option.
> >
> > > 7) Sylpheed Claws manages to briliantly organize the  
> > > multitude of options from Sylpheed preferences in a window  
> > > with chapters and subchapters on the left side (no more  
> > > sub-tabs in a tab of the Preferences window).
> >
> > Is that a custom widget?  I don't know of a Gtk widget that  
> > would do that...
> >
>
> I'm posting a screenshot at  
> http://gnomero.ath.cx/sylpheed-claws_preferences.png and here's  
> a (hopefully useful) snippet from Sylpheed-Claws's source code:
[ code snipped ]

Thanks!  Yes, that's a clean look.  We could do something similar  
with a standard tree widget for the left panel and our current  
pages on the right.  If we created each page on the fly, the pref  
manager would also open up much faster!  But that would need some  
more substantial reorganization ;-(

Again, many thanks for the thoughtful comments!

Best,

Peter