Re: [Evolution] UI issue with failing connections and their dialogs

[Ben FrantzDale <bfrantzdale hmc edu>]

On 08 Aug 2001 23:50:02 +0200, Janne wrote:
> I just came home after being away for a day or so, and I've had
> Evolution running while away. For some reason, my network connection has
> been down most of the time I was away, and when Evo dutifully checked
> mail every ten minutes, it couldn't, and popped up a warning dialog -
> one dialog per server, every ten minutes for an entire night and day...
> Needless to say, that's a _lot_ of dialogs to click away.

I totally agree. it's very, VERY anoying. I think this bug covers it:
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1823
Though I remember there being some coppies of this bug around.

> My suggestion (and I'd like a bit of feedback on this) would be to
> dispense with those dialogs entirely, and instead write a warning on the
> bottom toolbar thingy in the main window. This warning would remain
> until something else displayed a line on it (checking new mail,
> whatever), so that the user always can see whether the latest fetch
> worked.

I think there should be one error so that if the user is doing something
else (s)he is made aware of the problem. There should only be one
dialog, though.

> An alternative (but perhaps inferior) alternative would be to remove the
> dialogs after some time (1 minute, perhaps) even if they aren't clicked
> on.

That's unusual behavior for dialogs but It'd be kinda nice. Then you
wouldn't see any error dialogs if there were a breif network outage
while you weren't around your computer.

BTW, what does Outlook do?

--Ben