Re: [Evolution-hackers] Evolution 2.0 UI proposal
- From: Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>
- To: evolution-hackers lists ximian com
- Cc: evolution ximian com
- Subject: Re: [Evolution-hackers] Evolution 2.0 UI proposal
- Date: 11 Jul 2003 12:34:51 +0200
Le ven 11/07/2003 à 00:44, Ettore Perazzoli a écrit :
> Hello!
>
> Here at Ximian we have been brainstorming a bit about what happens
> next in the Evolution world. One of the ideas that has come up is a
> substantial overhaul of Evolution's UI.
I think this should also be discussed on usuability mailing list..
> Since images speak better than words, here are the mockups for some
> designs that Anna has developed: (this is just to give a very rough
> idea of what it would be like; the icons and labels are not final, the
> widgets are not the real ones etc.)
>
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_contacts.png
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_calendar.png
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_mail.png
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_tasks.png
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_navbar_shrunk.png
>
> The most important changes are:
>
> * You no longer see all the types of folders at once. You
> switch between calendar, mail, tasks and contacts by
> clicking on the buttons at the bottom.
> * The calendar allows you to see multiple calendar at once.
> Also you can subscribe to web calendars and see them in the
> pane on the left as well.
Very good ideas for those two..
>
> There are a few reasons for us to go with this design:
>
> * It kills the all-in-one tree view, which currently makes it
> difficult to reach for your calendar or contacts folders,
> since they are hiding between all the various mail folders.
> You no longer need to hunt for you calendar folder scrolling
> through the tree to see what your schedule is like, you just
> click on an easily accessible button marked "Calendar".
> Much better navigation. (Please note that, although it's
> not obvious from the mockup, we would still have a mail
> folder tree, the same way we have it now. Calendar, Tasks
> and Contacts, however, would be just flat lists.)
>
> * Killing the tree view also simplifies the architecture a
> lot. Right now there is a lot of machinery in place to
> handle the tree, making sure that components don't step on
> each other's toes. In particular, the handling of local
> folders is a maintenance nightmare, and also makes it very
> hard to provide the hooks that hackers need eg. to access
> Evolution's folders and do cool desktop integration hacks.
>
> * The shell's APIs would be drastically reduced to just
> a couple calls and it would become a lot simpler to
> implement new components.
>
> * This design simplification would also allow components to be
> launched independently from each other. We could
> potentially even launch the shell without certain components
> (e.g. launch only the mailer) if the user wants it that way.
> If we wanted to have separated apps a la OS X we could
> trivially do that too.
>
> * As I mentioned, it allows side-by-side calendar viewing,
> which increases the usability of the calendar manyfold.
>
> On the other hand, if we go this way we are probably also going to
> drop the following features:
>
> * The summary. While the summary is neat, there is a general
> feeling (at least amongst the developers) that the mail and
> calendar summaries are not tremendously useful, and that
> weather and RDF and weather information is better suited for
> a specialized application. Also we are trying to reduce the
> amount of code we have to maintain, and this seems like a
> good candidate for trimming.
I have to agree with that.. With more specialized/powerful news
aggregator, I'm not sure Evolution aggregator is still useful..
> * The shortcut bar. It's been shown that only a relatively
> small part of the Evolution user community actually uses it,
> and we feel that it unnecessarily complicates the UI. The
> new design is much simpler to navigate anyways, and the
> shortcut bar would add clutter and complexity, both in code
> and UI. Also, it wouldn't be easy to implement in this
> model without keeping some of the shell's complexity that
> we would like to get rid of.
Agreed..
> Opinions?
Well, my only problem is for people (like me) who have a LOT of folders
(I have 50 folders, some embedded in others) instead of vfolders (they
are too much memory intensive when monitoring a lot of mailing lists,
like me..). These 6 buttons are very space consuming and I don't know
how it will look like without etree.. Maybe a drop-down list (a la
Nautilus, but with icons) would be better instead of the 6 buttons..
--
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>
Mandrakesoft
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