Re: [Evolution] Evolution 2.0 UI proposal

[Jack Coates <jack monkeynoodle org>]

On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 15:44, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.

that could work, I suppose. I usually run in three pane mode with the
folder list on the left, no shortcut bar. Buttons to quickly open things
like contacts and calendar would be nice. Getting them out of the tree
altogether is fine. They take up too much space there though -- I would
make them go along the status bar from lower right corner towards the
left (like Netscape used to do, or where Mozilla puts the
connection-state and ssl status icons).

Another big nice thing would be an ability to color code the folders in
the folder tree.

...
>       * 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.

oo, nice :-)

>       * As I mentioned, it allows side-by-side calendar viewing,
>           which increases the usability of the calendar manyfold.

nice.

> 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
...
>       * The shortcut bar.  It's been shown that only a relatively
...

wouldn't miss either one -- when I accidentally end up on the summary
page it always surprises me because I forgot it was there :-)
-- 
Jack Coates
Monkeynoodle: A Scientific Venture...
http://www.monkeynoodle.org/resume.html