[Evolution-hackers] Re: [Evolution] Evolution 2.0 UI proposal

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

>       * It's not obvious from the mockups whether or not it will be
>         possible to collapse trees.  (i.e. I don't see any +/- button
>         there.)  Hopefully that will still be possible.

Yeah, Anna just had trouble filling up the tree widget with some content
in Glade so she just cut and pasted some text with the Gimp instead.  It
is supposed to be a tree, just like the one we have now.

(Actually, we might port it to GtkTreeView.  Mike Kestner had ported it
a while ago but we decided to stick with ETree for 1.4 to limit the
number of changes; now it makes sense to put that code back in.)

>       * It should be possible to reorder/remove or at least collapse the
>         top-level categories (i.e. the "On My Computer," "On
>         sensitive.org," and "Virtual Folders" that appear on the list in
>         evo_mail2.png).  

Same as above.  This is also supposed to be a tree.

This is a very rough, early mockup to explain what the basic idea is, we
are going to have a more specific design later.  ;-)

>       * Should the search bar at the top be labeled with "Search"?   It
>         might improve usability to have "Search for [Messages
>         Containing] <input field>" instead of "[Message Contains] <input
>         field>"

The current way actually doesn't have a Search label either, I don't
know if it has ever been shown to be a usability problem.  I think Anna
tested it on people before.

>       * I don't see a Clear button for the search bar.  How will that
>         work?

Yeah, this is an oversight, instead of the magnifier icon there is going
to be a "clear search" icon there.

>       * In the calendar/contacts screenshots, I see a "Filter by
>         Category" list.  Will that also be available on the in the mail
>         view? 

That would be nice, yeah.  It's a pretty commonly requested feature, and
I assume is easy to implement in the mailer?

>       * If you axe the Summary, you'll only have 5 navigation buttons
>         (or whatever you call them), and that will look unbalanced. :)

The layout of the buttons actually will have to be dynamic in some way,
since we want to allow new components to be plugged in and the view
should just cope with that (and in particular, Connector might want to
have its own button there as well).

We'll have to write some custom layout code and try to figure out what
is the best way to move them around when the size of the pane changes.

-- Ettore