[Evolution-hackers] Evolution 2.0 UI proposal

["Brent L. Damms" <brent damms globalinbox com>]

Hi

Firstly, thanks for producing Evolution in the first place it's a great
piece of software.

The thing that's obvious about this, and a lot of proposals, is you
can't please everyone.

However, conceptually I'm not yet convinced that some of the proposal(s)
will be accepted by a greater number of people than already use Evo1.

This is simply because a "user" doesn't always see (or even use) the UI
as the programmer/hacker intended.

I like the concept of grouping, but what we have to day solves most
cases.

Indeed what it difference in users mind between these two screen shots.

http://jason.redsys.net/evo2/calendar.png

http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_calendar.png

I'd seriously argue not a great deal; OK the visuals are different but
the conceptual framework is the same - i.e. a group of calendars

Following on from this, why should Evo2 group on a type of dataset
(Emails / Calendar etc...). Surely shouldn't the UI allow the user to
group on whatever is useful to them.

Think "Department, Company, Friends, Project X" etc

What is a group for one person might not be to another and why not have
nested groups of information?

http://jason.redsys.net/evo2/what-is-a-group.png

Maybe the UI should be re-designed maybe it shouldn't.
I think the key is to give the user flexibility but with a good set of
defaults/examples.

For my money features like vFolders are _FANTASTIC_ as they are very
flexible to my personal changing requirements.

I'm all for keeping things simple at the coding end but this isn't why
users switch to Evo. They do so because it replaces a current tool(s)
with a better way of managing their lives - hence it needs to give not
take away features/flexiblity/power/etc.

Lastly, why do we _NEED_ an Evolution Version 2 in the first place?

Good look and let the debate continue.

Kind regards

Brent

P.S. Isn't it about time we had a GPL Evo Groupware Server to play with
;-)