Re: [Evolution-hackers] Re: Attachment UI Improvements

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 11:22 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 09:32 +0530, Not Zed wrote:
> > The reason we can't drop into the main view is multi-fold.  One, there
> > is a mixing of semantics of what a drop means in a text area.  But of
> > course the other thing is bonobo - we simple cannot access the
> > required information from the editor component.
>
> We should fix that then. Whatever that means. If Bonobo is the
> bottleneck in the end, then we should fix the composer to be usable
> without needing Bonobo, so that we can do this. Or, we can add
> appropriate APIs to the editor control, so that we can get the
> information that we do need, from the control.

Yes sure.  Problem is Radek has just, or is just about to, leave evolution.

I chatted to him about it just before he went back, and it sounds like a reasonable amount of work.  Maybe 2 weeks.  If you know what you're doing.  And only Radek and Larry would be in that position.  The GtkHTMLEditor interface glue code is around 10K.  Some of that could be reused, but the api should also be simplified, and we need some way to do menu merging (we could still use bonoboui for that though) so it isn't just a straight CORBA<>GtkWidget conversion.

There are many many problems to fix, and its a matter of resources as always.  Slightly inconvenient dnd hardly seems a show-stopper when we have real performance and memory issues to fix - which was as I understand it, what this release was supposed to be all about.

> > > > Another issue that we've seen in some of our usability tests here is
> > > > that people are confused by the file selector in the context of
> > > > attaching a file to a mail they are composing.  
> > > > 
> > > > First they click the 'Attach' button in the composer's toolbar, then
> > > > select a file using the file selector.  Then, they hit the '+' button in
> > > > the file selector to add the attachment to the mail.  Of course, this
> > > > button is for adding bookmarks to the file selector, not for adding
> > > > attachments to mails.
> > 
> > > > It would help if the button in the file selector said "Attach" instead
> > > > of "Open," and if the icon were attachment-appropriate.
> > > 
> > > I actually have a patch for this. I forgot about it, and it is included
> > > in the latest version of the mailer menus redux patch that I just sent
> > > to the list. I'm not sure what the current state of the evolution tree
> > > is for being able to commit things, given the maintainership changes.
> > > If it is open for me to commit though, I am glad to do that. :)
> > > 
> > > > >   - Use attachment icon list area for display instead of buttons
> > > > 
> > > > This will require that we add a "Save attachment" menu item to the
> > > > right-click menu on the attachment area.
> > > 
> > > The context-menu for the mail display will have to be entirely different
> > > than it is for the composer attachment area, anyway. We will probably
> > > want to have "Open with..." and other such menu items as well.
> > 
> > What is this?  The display of attachments in the mail display???
>
> Yes. To get rid of the ugly buttons inside the mail display, and place
> the icon list area at the bottom of the mail display, for accessing the
> attachments.

This is a pretty significant code change.

Apart from the mail display needing pretty major refactoring - the design is aimed squarely at inline viewing where possible, the attachment bar is a hard to use pile of shit and it would need rewriting if we wanted to do anything useful with it.

What are we going to do to show inline image attachments?  Inline message attachments?  Write popup viewers for every type?  Force users to popup multiple windows just to get at nested attachments?

> > Where is the original email that started this discussion?
>
> Somehow, evolution decided that I wanted to attach a 108K patch to the
> message, presumably because I just sent another mail with a 108K patch,
> just before the original mail for this thread. So, it ended up in the
> moderation queue for the list. I've just re-sent a copy without the
> patch attached.

> > Also note that "save all attacments" is just a hacked up plugin
> > demonstration.
>
> Noted. We should then make it not a hacked-up plug-in, and fix it to
> be usable and easily accessible by users.

Well, I dont have time for that.