Re: [Evolution] suggestion for evolution

[David L <idht4n gmail com>]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 9:13 PM, Nick Jenkins wrote:
> > > >  It would be a lot better if instead of greying out the
> > > >  "send/receive" button if it switched to saying "work online"
<snip>
> I'm kind of with the original poster.
<snip>
> So to me, it makes sense to try doing something different with this
> button in offline mode. Some possibilities for discussion:
> * good: if the button's tooltip changed in offline mode to say "You
> cannot send and receive because you are currently offline", that might
> help people somewhat.
> * better: toggle this button to mean "work online".
> * best: toggle this button to mean "work online and then send/receive".
> If the button is clicked and Evo can't go online for some reason, give
> the user a popup dialog notifying them of this.

I completely agree.  In fact, I'd take it a step further...
every greyed out button in every application should
have some obvious help like Nick has suggested.
When I become benevolent dictator, I shall mandate this...
violators will see my non-benevolent side.  ;)

In another email, somebody suggested a highly
noticeable banner, but I prefer Nick's solutions
because they use currently worthless GUI real
estate (the greyed out button) to tell you what
the problem is and the same solution could be
applied to most applications.  No matter how
obvious the banner is, to me it's less obvious
than the button itself providing the information.
If multiple buttons are greyed out for different
reasons, you don't need to go looking through
a banner to find out which current state might
be resulting in the button that you want to push
being greyed out.

Cheers...

                    David