Re: [Geary] Suggestions for Minor UI Tweaks

[Khurshid Alam <khurshid alam linuxmail org>]

Hi,

I'd like to suggest five simple UI tweaks which will greatly improve the Geary user interface.  Please refer to the attached image which highlights these five items.

First of all you are default Gnome theme Adwaita. Adwaita doesn't have any sort of style for Geary. It is a very bad example for this case. Try other themes. Here is the screenshot using Numix: https://i.imgur.com/852cchy.png

And second of all, everything should be configurable from theme. Not hard-coded.

1. Remove the dark gray background surrounding the messages panel, and just use the theme's default text area background color (in most cases, ~white).

- The current gray shade doesn't match with all themes, and it visually detracts from the actual message.

- It is unnecessarily, because the user already understands that this panel displays the e-mail message.
- It is inconsistent with the rest of the UI, which is "flat"; this portion implies 3-D depth, but we see that nowhere else in the UI.  (It may be OK to keep the shadow that outlines the message, but even that can be removed; we already have the shape/outline of the panel to delineate the message area from the rest of the UI).

- Note that the "docked" New Message panel does not have the same gray background, so this is an inconsistent appearance for the UI.

Background uses @theme_bg_color. So it matches perfectly for any theme. 

However Geary needs a style class (didn't we already have that?) to change it from theme. 

Again you are using Adwaita and that is why it looks inconsistent, i.e one side is flat, other side isn't

Also it won't look well when not using three-pane-view.

2. Make the vertical border line between the messages list and the message panel, 1px wide. 

1px with will make it very difficult to drag with mouse. Beside those borders are necessary to keep things from overlap with three-pane-view and non three-pane-view. So a big NO from me on this.

3. Remove all horizontal lines separating messages in the message panel

- These are redundant and unnecessary...

- There is already a visual gap between the messages, so these extra lines make the UI look cluttered and busy.

- The larger fonts used for sender, subject, and date already imply a visual separation between messages in the list.

- The horizontal lines distract the user from the most important part -- the content.

No. In my view line keeps each message cell separated and prevents overlapping specially when some weird unicode texts present in email body.

However in this case, line width can be made 1px (see Numix screenshot) and semi transparent. Again it requires a style class to theme it properly. In < gtk-3.18 we can do something like this:

ConversationListView {

    -gtkwidget-focus-line-width: 1px;

    -gtktreeview-grid-line-width: 0;

}

ConversationListView.view.cell {

    border-style: solid;

    border-width: 0 0 1px 0;

    border-color: border_normal($theme_bg_color);

}

4. As with #2, make the vertical border line between the messages list and the Inboxes panel, 1px wide.

Again drag-with-mouse issue. But it can be made configurable from theme

5. Remove the frame/border around the Inboxes panel.

- This is unecessary and redundant, since other parts of the UI already have borders.

- This makes a double thick border running down 90% of the left portion of the UI.  (See the zoom-in bubble for #4 and #5 in the attached image).  Removing the frame around the Inboxes panel would remedy this problem.

Frame-border is necessary in non three-pane-view. And you can drag it in that view (see above screenshot)

In three-pane-view it can be fully transparent from gtk theme and hence merging with background

Additional thoughts:

Would it be possible to use the selected background color (@selected_bg_color) from the current theme as the fill color for the message count bubbles?  For example, on Ubuntu, with the default Abiance theme, the bubble should be orange with white text; with the Arc theme, the bubble should blue with white text; etc.  Note: if this were done, we would have to invert the bubble and text colors whenever a row with a message count was selected, so this may a bit more effort to implement than the five suggestions above.

I agree on this. Message count bubble should be theme-able.

Thanks.