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

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 23:33, David B. Ritch wrote:
> I would be sorry to see the shortcut bar go away.  Cleaning up the
> navigation issues will help a great deal, but I have another issue, as
> well.  In particular, I have my incoming email sorted into a bunch of
> folders, and have these folders sorted in an appropriate way.  There are
> a couple of folders that I need to monitor for incoming email pretty
> constantly, and there are a couple others that change.  I have handled
> this be using shortcuts to those that I need to watch at any given
> time.  It is not clear to me how I could have the same functionality -
> select a small number of email folders and monitor them for new messages
> - with the proposed new GUI.

Yeah, that might be an issue.  I wonder if there is a better way to
solve that than the shortcut bar though...

The shortcut bar seems like a pretty overenginnered solution for that
specific problem to me, since it's more of a navigational tool than a
monitoring tool.  For example, if the purpose is just to have the unread
count for a bunch of folders always visible in some spot, then shortcut
grouping isn't really needed...  Also the layout is suboptimal since it
takes a lot of space for the icons, which is good for clicking but not
necessary if all you want is the unread count.

One possibility could be to keep a list of favorite folders under the
main folder tree.  However, Outlook 2003 does that, and I don't like it
since it makes the left pane extremely crowded and it's not obvious what
is going on at first glance.

Another thing we could do is to allow the user to customize the order of
the folders through drag and drop, instead of hardcording it to
alphabetical order.  That's been a wishlist item since the early days of
the project, and might fix your problem as well?

-- Ettore