Hi Everyone, I know that this has been mentioned by Steven Marcotte and others on the Novell support forum, but I wanted to add my voice to some of the differences I encountered when upgrading to Fedora Core 3 yesterday. I want to start with the fact that I've been using Evolution since it arrived on the scene in tarball form. 2.0 seems to be faster for some things and finally at least partially solves the "doesn't pay attention to the system toolbar settings" problem which was pretty-much my biggest outstanding gripe for a while now. With 2.0, it has less text, but it'd still be nice if it would pay attention to the system settings. The short list: 1) lack of being able to hide the folders/buttons is really annoying 2) lack of message count for current selected folder makes it difficult to monitor status of mailboxes 3) business/strategy problem for wooing Outlook users The details: #1: Please, please, please put in a way to hide the folders/buttons I am fortunate to have a big screen on my laptop, but I like to have lots of overlapping windows present so I can see what's happening in multiple places at a glance. I run Evolution 1.4 sized to a 640x689 window. After upgrading, the folder width was 200px (30% of the total window). I tried to figure out a way to hide the folders, to no avail, then tried to do the old Netscape 4/6 trick of sizing the pane to zero. Nope. That didn't work either. The minimum width I was able to accomplish was 115px (18% of the window). My usage patterns are that I monitor my inbox and then file everything as needed. This means that I normally only ever care about one Inbox at a time. I also generally monitor external email boxes, but they aren't as critical, so I manually check them from time to time. I nearly *never* use the folder view if you consider how many times I pop it up vs the number of hours Evolution is running. Now, I'm either forced to enlarge my window so that my visible message area is the same, or I have scrunched messages. Either way, I'm wasting 115px of screen real estate. I'm not saying that the way I use Evolution should be the default for all users, however, I find it very frustrating that I can't continue to configure the application the way that I want--regardless of any accessibility issues that it may cause. If I had accessibility problems, I wouldn't run it that way. If I don't, I should be able to use it as efficiently as possible. #2 Monitoring mailbox(es) with minimized windows is also something I do quite often Generally, when I am able to do so, I have one version of Evolution running for my personal mail and one version running for my work mail. One of these is always local and the other is always remote (xhosted to whatever machine I'm sitting in front of). With the message numbers in the title bar, all I have to do is look at the window list to see if I have mail. Also, I shouldn't have to run a separate applet or icon just to tell me if I have mail or not. If I choose to, that's one thing, but having the unread messages in the title bar is a very good usability feature. #3 Business, marketing, strategy and Outlook As much as I hate to admit it, Outlook owns the email of the majority of business users. Originally, Evolution was designed to allow those users to have an easy migration to a better tool (at least so it seemed to me). With the new design, you no longer have that edge. Of course, the reality is that it'll be a long time before *nix/Evolution will replace the majority of the Outlook installations, but having the same metaphor choices seemed to be a good idea. Do I use things like the Shortcut bar? No. Should it be there? Probably. I know that things change--there's no way around that, but I think that providing features for "power users" or whatever you want to call them so that they can work as efficiently as possible with the one thing we have more of than we want (email) is a "good thing". Taking that away without providing an alternative way to accomplish more-or-less the same thing can't be good. I don't expect everyone to use the tools I use in the same way, but that's exactly why they're such powerful and useful tools. I was forced to use Outlook for 6 weeks and felt like I'd lost the use of both my hands trying to manage my email. Fortunately, I didn't delete my 1.4 evolution directory (thank you for the option!!!!) so I was able to re-install Fedora Core 2 (and Evolution 1.4) today with no loss of data. I look forward to the advancement of Evolution and am extremely appreciative of the work done by the team. You folks have made me not worry about how I was going to read my email since you rescued me from the wasteland I was in between losing (NeXT)Mail.app and finding Evolution. Keep up the good work, but please keep the business requirements driving the software rather than the other way around. Thanks for listening, ast -- Andrew S. Townley <atownley eircom net> http://te-code.sourceforge.net/
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