Re: [Evolution] CVS Evolution: Mac-like interface

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

The Mac does not seem to have any menu items for the message-browser
window other than "close window". For sure it does not allow next/prev.

personally I feel reading mail using the message-browser is broken
anyway.

Think of this as getting rid of excess baggage :-)

Not to mention it makes the message-browser code extremely simple to
maintain and very fast to load as well. The old message-browser code was
the ugliest code any programmer has ever seen in his entire life due to
the chaining of async calls/signal callbacks that were needed in order
to simply load the message in the GtkHTML widget. Add on top of that a
few more hacks to make the menu items work (which were only meant to be
used on a FolderBrowser object). Even after all of that, you still have
a ton of bugs because the message-browser doesn't use the same sort as
the main window, nor does using next/prev update the selected message in
the message-list in the main window. In fact, doing this would be
extremely difficult and would probably require a complete overhaul of
all of the mailer code (not gonna happen anytime soon).

The way I see it, the only use for opening a message-browser window is
to view it full screen. A mesage-list is what should be used for
navigating messages - that's the whole purpose of the message-list
afterall.

Just because mutt and pine let you browse with a "message-browser"
doesn't make it the best way to read mail. It's just that for console,
that is the most efficient way of doing it because you don't have as
much space to work with (25x80 is just not enough to be able to split
into a message-list and view pane).

I'm on a 15" monitor with 1024x768 resolution using 14pt fonts and 90%
of the mail I get can be viewed in a single message-list/view-pane split
at 1/3:2/3 ratio. And assuming that's not possible, I can hit the space
bar and it'll scroll. It's not like you can get much more efficient than
that. 

As far as I can tell, there are only 2 reasons to ever use the
message-browser window:

1. you are the type of person that uses the message-browser for viewing
as much message as possible at full screen and using the next/prev
toolbar buttons. If this is you, perhaps you should consider shrinking
the size of your message-list (since you obviously don't use it anyway).
By doing this, you get nearly as much viewable message as you do with a
full-screen view message-browser window.


2. you are the type of person that likes maximal message-list view and
use the message-browser to read mail. If this is you, then the current
message-browser solution shouldn't be a problem for you - it does
exactly what you always wanted.



My humble-but-correct-opinion said, I will look into either rolling back
to the old message-browser window for the 1.2 release or else modifying
the current mesage-browser window to subclass GnomeApp (thus having
menus/toolbars) that allow the user to reply and forward the viewed
message (will not move/copy/delete or do next/prev because that would be
impossible to implement without doing evil gross hacks).


Jeff


PS: patches welcome.


On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 20:24, Not Zed wrote:
> Ahah!  Yes that is exactly it.
>
> You mac loving GUI designers please take note ... without the global
> context-sensitive menu bar (which personally I think is a great idea,
> AmigaOS had one too) you need to chuck on menu bars (and these days tool
> bars) and other crap which clutter the ui, but is still necessary,
> otherwise you end up with a non-functional app that is hard to use (even
> if its 'simple').
>
> On Thu, 2002-05-23 at 00:09, Ujwal S. Sathyam wrote:
> > Actually, I have been a Mac user for years, and the user interface 
> > has worked for me nicely all along.
> >
> > What is missing in Evolution attempts to mimic the Mac interface is 
> > that there is no global application-specific menu bar that all the 
> > application windows can share. If that were there, this approach 
> > would work. However, the Linux GUIs currently do not support that.
> >
> > Ujwal
> >
> >
> >
> > At 1:31 PM +0300 5/22/02, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> > > No need to.  Just roll back CVs to where it was for the required 
> > > files and wake
> > > up to the fact that not everything Mac does is the right thing to do, however
> > > cute and apparently user-friendly it might be. ,-)
> > >
> > > On 21 May 2002, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> > > >  You're free to submit a patch :-)
> > >
> > > --
> > > Martin-Éric Racine, Helsinki, Finland.
> > > http://www.pp.fishpool.fi/~q-funk/
> > > +358 41 474 0289
> > >
> > >
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