[Evolution] Re: [Evolution-hackers] Evolution 2.0 UI proposal

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>]

Le ven 11/07/2003 à 00:44, Ettore Perazzoli a écrit :
> Hello!
>
> Here at Ximian we have been brainstorming a bit about what happens
> next in the Evolution world.  One of the ideas that has come up is a
> substantial overhaul of Evolution's UI.

I think this should also be discussed on usuability mailing list..

> Since images speak better than words, here are the mockups for some
> designs that Anna has developed: (this is just to give a very rough
> idea of what it would be like; the icons and labels are not final, the
> widgets are not the real ones etc.)
>
>       http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_contacts.png
>       http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_calendar.png
>       http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_mail.png
>       http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_tasks.png
>       http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_navbar_shrunk.png
>
> The most important changes are:
>
>       * You no longer see all the types of folders at once.  You
>           switch between calendar, mail, tasks and contacts by
>           clicking on the buttons at the bottom.
>       * The calendar allows you to see multiple calendar at once.
>           Also you can subscribe to web calendars and see them in the
>           pane on the left as well.

Very good ideas for those two..
> There are a few reasons for us to go with this design:
>
>       * It kills the all-in-one tree view, which currently makes it
>           difficult to reach for your calendar or contacts folders,
>           since they are hiding between all the various mail folders.
>           You no longer need to hunt for you calendar folder scrolling
>           through the tree to see what your schedule is like, you just
>           click on an easily accessible button marked "Calendar".
>           Much better navigation.  (Please note that, although it's
>           not obvious from the mockup, we would still have a mail
>           folder tree, the same way we have it now.  Calendar, Tasks
>           and Contacts, however, would be just flat lists.)
>
>       * Killing the tree view also simplifies the architecture a
>           lot.  Right now there is a lot of machinery in place to
>           handle the tree, making sure that components don't step on
>           each other's toes.  In particular, the handling of local
>           folders is a maintenance nightmare, and also makes it very
>           hard to provide the hooks that hackers need eg. to access
>           Evolution's folders and do cool desktop integration hacks.
>
>       * The shell's APIs would be drastically reduced to just
>         a couple calls and it would become a lot simpler to 
>           implement new components.
>
>       * This design simplification would also allow components to be
>           launched independently from each other.  We could
>           potentially even launch the shell without certain components
>           (e.g. launch only the mailer) if the user wants it that way.
>           If we wanted to have separated apps a la OS X we could
>           trivially do that too.
>
>       * As I mentioned, it allows side-by-side calendar viewing,
>           which increases the usability of the calendar manyfold.
>
> On the other hand, if we go this way we are probably also going to
> drop the following features:
>
>       * The summary.  While the summary is neat, there is a general
>           feeling (at least amongst the developers) that the mail and
>           calendar summaries are not tremendously useful, and that
>           weather and RDF and weather information is better suited for
>           a specialized application.  Also we are trying to reduce the
>           amount of code we have to maintain, and this seems like a
>           good candidate for trimming.

I have to agree with that.. With more specialized/powerful news
aggregator, I'm not sure Evolution aggregator is still useful..

>       * The shortcut bar.  It's been shown that only a relatively
>         small part of the Evolution user community actually uses it, 
>           and we feel that it unnecessarily complicates the UI.  The 
>           new design is much simpler to navigate anyways, and the 
>           shortcut bar would add clutter and complexity, both in code
>           and UI.  Also, it wouldn't be easy to implement in this 
>           model without keeping some of the shell's complexity that
>           we would like to get rid of.

Agreed..
  
> Opinions?

Well, my only problem is for people (like me) who have a LOT of folders
(I have 50 folders, some embedded in others) instead of vfolders (they
are too much memory intensive when monitoring a lot of mailing lists,
like me..). These 6 buttons are very space consuming and I don't know
how it will look like without etree.. Maybe a drop-down list (a la
Nautilus, but with icons) would be better instead of the 6 buttons..

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>
Mandrakesoft