[Evolution] Pop-up widgets

[Abe Fettig <abe fettig net>]

Just downloaded the 5/25 snapshot.  Evolution is really looking great!

However, I have a some usability concerns with the way pop-up widgets
work.  Specifially: How to make them go away?

Example 1.  I am working in the Tasks view.  I click in the Due Date
field, and a little down-arrow appears on the right hand side.  I click
on the down arrow (mostly out of curiosity), and a nice little
calendar-selection widget appears.  So far, so good.  Now I decide that
I would rather not select a date from the calendar widget, so I click on
another part of the evolution window, figuring that, as with drop-down
menus, this will make it go away.  Hmm.  It's still there.  Well, come
to think of it, I don't really need to edit that task right now, I'll
just go back to my Inbox... But it's still there, floating above my
Inbox window!  I take a closer look at it.  Ah, I see, there's a button
that says "None"... I click it and it goes away.

Example 2:  I just got a message from a friend.  I can't remember if
he's in my addressbook or not, so right-click his address.  I see his
detailed address information pop up (incidentally, it pops up wherever
my mouse is when the addressbook query is done, even if it's now on the
other side of the screen), so I know he's already in my address book.
OK, now I just want to make the contact widget go away.  Based on my
experience with the Date Picker, I look for a button to make it go
away... but there is none.  Hmm.  Maybe if I just click on it, but don't
press the button, it will disapear.  Nope, still there.  Ok, let me try
clicking somewhere on the main Evo window... but before I can even get
there, the contact widget disappears on it's own.

The problems here are relatively minor, and it just took a little bit of
fooling around on my part to figure out the behavior of two different
pop-up widgets.  But, IMHO, it is NOT intuitive, especially in the way
that the different widgets behave differently from each other and
different from widgets that the user might be familiar with, such as a
drop-down menu.  I think some consistent guidelines for pop-up/drop-down
widget behavior might be a good idea.  The idea here is that someday
people with no previous computer experience are going to be using Gnome.
It's not to hard to imagine a flood of tech support calls from people
who can't make the date picker go away.

This is not meant to be a critisism of whoever wrote the code for those
widgets.  They work great otherwise ;-).

Abe