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Re: [Evolution] User impressions about Evolution

Il ven, 2003-10-17 alle 17:32, Jeffrey Stedfast ha scritto:

On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 04:47, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:


1. I noticed that Evo is fast, really faster than MM on my 2200 Athlon
box; memory usage, OTOH, is much higher than I expected/remembered: is
it normal to reach 60Mb? why does it seem to increase with time?
Fortunately I have plenty of memory, but it was a mild shock noticing
that Evo starts a session with about 31-2 megs (in itself much more than
I remembered) and it might end up with almost 60 MB: is this related to
the amount of mails stored in the database?


yes. you're complaining about 60 megabytes? that's nothing. the more
mail you have, the more memory evolution uses. we do as much as we
reasonably can to keep memory usage down such as using string pools,
memory chunks, shared ref-counted objects, etc. If you know of a way to
make it use less memory, feel free to tell us about this new trick :-)


I will have to think about it ;) But that's a useful tip anyway, because
now I know I can reduce memory usage by getting rid of old stuff.

How about an "Archive folder" (/"Archive message") function? Letting you
zip and store away in an "Archive" dir all that you don't need at hand
anymore. Then you could "Browse archived mail" by uncompressing archived
files in temporary folders, just in case you have to find that three
years old mail. Would be nice.


2. The UI is OK, or I'm getting used to it (waiting for Evo 2.0), but
there are some quirks: why can't I change accelerators/shortcuts as with
other GNOME apps?


because the bonobo menu items don't allow it. only gtk menus allow it,
and that was considered a bug. I don't think gtk2.0 allows this anymore.
(Nope, it doesn't. Just checked :-)


Actually, it does: you have to use gconf-editor and set a key to allow
for this feature, but it's definitely there and I use it all the time
(GNOME 2.4). The usability people never considered this a "bug", but as
a "power user" feature, so they've taken it away from normal
preferences.

When a shortcut consists of only one key on an en keyboard, but requires
two, possibly far away, keys on other keyboards, you can't but be
grateful for feature :) A pity bonobo menus don't support it.


 f.i. I just had the habit to press N to go to the next
unread message, with Evo it's a rather unintuitive ], and I have to
press two keys; so I'd like to change the shortcut, but it seems to be
impossible.


just use , and . - only 1 key.


Well thanks, that's nice to know! But is this documented somewhere?
Didn't read about it in the current docs.
 

3. Again on the subject of moving to the next unread message, using the
space bar should do just that (or at least move to the next message);
and when there aren't unread messages left, it would be nice to move to
the next folder (MM asks you if you want to do that, actually).


this has been discussed and found to be counter-intuitive. space should
scroll the message, but NOT jump to the next message. that behaviour
would be extremely annoying to a lot of users (including myself, who
*hates* that feature of mutt).


Makes sense, just thought it could be useful as an alternative to a
double-key shortcut to new messages.
 

4. Threads aren't displayed very well: messages that should belong to
the same thread are dispersed according to their date in many different
threads.


huh? we thread according to in-reply-to and references headers. we don't
thread based on date. this makes no sense.


Agreed, but that's what happens. Instead of having this:

Subject A - 2003-10-15
 Subject A - 2003-10-16
  Subject A - 2003-10-17
Subject B - 2003-10-14
 Subject B - 2003-10-15
  Subject B - 2003-10-16
   Subject B - 2003-10-17
    Subject B - 2003-10-18

I get this:

Subject B - 2003-10-17
 Subject B - 2003-10-18
Subject A - 2003-10-15
 Subject A - 2003-10-16
  Subject A - 2003-10-17
Subject B - 2003-10-14
 Subject B - 2003-10-15
  Subject B - 2003-10-16

however I fiddle with the settings.


 This is quite annoying and, in some ways, unpredictable (i.e.
in certain folders threads behave better than in others), is this a
problem specific to the last Evo releases?


huh? no. likely a bug in the other clients you communicate with if
anything. they probably aren't properly setting the threading headers.


I'm not following you here: what do you mean with "the other clients"? I
just download emails from my POP server, Evolution is the client here.
Threading in the same folders works great using Messenger (don't know
about other clients).


5. Another (minor) issue with threads: the grey/white line coloring is
great when order messages without threading, but is slightly confusing
when you use threads; it would be nice to differentiate between
differents threads alternating white for *all* messages that belong to a
thread, grey for all those that belong to the next one, and so on. Don't
know if the text widget allows this.


*shrug* might be a good idea. no one has ever suggested this before
afaik, perhaps submit it as a feature request for the GAL::ETree widget.


OK, but I noticed not everyone would be happy with this :)


6. One last note about threads (I promise :) : add a "Mark all as read
in thread" command, would be a real time saver.


Edit->Select Thread
Edit->Mark As Read


Whoops, didn't cross my mind, perhaps because Ctrl-H Ctrl-K is so
emacs-ish ;)


it'd be silly to have a Mark All Messages In Thread As Read menu (not to
mention how long the label is...)


I surely didn't expect you to follow my indication literally :)
Messenger does this with Message -> Mark -> Thread As Read, but it's
very convenient that you can do that using only one shortcut key (R).


7. I have lots of folders and, as a consequence, lots of folder icons in
the folder bar: "special" (in the sense of "not a folder") icons like
Contacts, Calendar are scarcely visible among all other folder icons; as
the shortcut bar won't be there in Evo 2.0, take this into consideration
when deciding how and where to draw those special icons.


each component will have its own folder tree in 2.0


Good idea.


8. Import routines have their own quirks, for instance I had to import
manually all of my Mozilla folders because only Pine (?) was listed in
the "general" import dialog; and when importing Mozilla addressbooks, I
had to specify the format once or twice, because it wasn't recognized
automatically.


there are probably bugs in bugzilla about this. if not, probably add
them (preferably with sample files etc)


OK.
 

9. Why is a HTML commands tool bar present in the mail composing window
even if I chose to not compose mails in HTML format?


because it still has some tools that are useful even in plain text
formatting.


Makes sense.


10. IMAP mail seems to have some problems (with this versions), but
others have already mentioned them on the list, so I won't go there
again; is there a way to have Evo automatically download all of the
messages available on the remote folder?


select the folder as an offline folder and evo will sync it to a local
cache.


At the moment my remote IMAP folders are acting crazy with every mail
client I use, so will have to experiment later :( /me doesn't like IMAP

Thanks for your all answers, keep up the good work!

Ciao
-- 
 
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      roberto.rossellidelturco at unito.it
Dipartimento di Scienze         rosselli at ling.unipi.it
del Linguaggio                  Then spoke the thunder  DA
Universita' di Torino           Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)
 
  Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
  mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)
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