Re: [evolution-patches] Fix to resize the composer attachment bar

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 00:56 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 09:51 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 09:12 +0800, Not Zed wrote:
> > > I have to agree.  It seems to be a completely sub-optimal solution to
> > > the problem.
> > > 
> > > First, force the attachment bar to be open all the time, removing a
> > > useful and common trick of having a collapser (a favourite on mac i
> > > might add, which we seem to be religiously copying in gnome).  Then find
> > > 'oh dear, this takes up too much space', so hack in a very crappy
> > > solution of letting the user re-size the bar - which given how big and
> > > silly the icons are will make it unusable unless it is full size anyway.
> > 
> > I feel that its better to have a soln of resize instead of show/hide
> > mode. I guess most mail clients work that way. Mac, has a total
> > different expander, which doesnt even has a scrolled window inside it.
> 
> Why does the attachment pane need to be separate from the message body,
> rather than showing the attachments at the end of the message?

the biggest reason would be that gtkhtml's editor doesn't support this
and I'd bet it wouldn't be trivial to add either.

also, the editor should strive to be WYSIWYG, which this idea would not
really support...

I also wonder if it wouldn't be more confusing to the user than the
attachment bar anyway since the editor would constantly have to prevent
the user from typing below the attachments (if it was all just in the
text editor widget, what would hint to the user that he couldn't type
below the attachment icons?). Maybe I'm just visualising your suggestion
incorrectly...

>   This
> way, you could just backspace over the icon to delete the attachment,
> and dnd into the message body to attach.

nice idea but I don't think it would work in practice (not to mention
non-trivial)

if the attachments are always going to be at the bottom anyway, it seems
easier to just use the current attachment bar.

the only problem we really need to solve here is making it so that the
user can drop the attachment he wants to add anywhere on the composer
window and have it be attached.

there's no real need to change the attachment bar ui from the way it was
in 2.2 afaict (I certainly don't seem to recall seeing any bugs reported
about wanting to be able to resize it or anything else)

I'm not necessarily against adding the ability to resize the attachment
bar, but we should definitely go back to having the expander I think -
if we then add the resize ability, we should probably make it such that
you couldn't resize to smaller than what is needed to display a single
row of attachment icons.

Jeff