Hi all!
Thanks to all the devs for your fantastic work on this awesome email client!!! The best email client on Linux, hands-down. Better than most Windows clients too. Fantastic!
Please do not take offense at my strong critique. It's not meant to insult anyone. I appreciate y'all. Just imagine an anonymous user who doesn't know or care about all your hard work. They are only annoyed with the application cuz it doesn't behave as they expect. So, without taking offense, consider: would you like other users out there getting similarly annoyed with certain behaviors? Or is the goal to create a pleasurable experience?
Not claiming my critiques are even legitimate, they are just my emotioinal reaction to the app. Not trying to blame or point fingers.
Geary is a wonderful application, and seems that a lot (most?) of bugs have been fixed. That's the most important thing. Aside from bugs, none of these workflow requests are really critical. There are workarounds for each of them. Consider it a high compliment if the only critiques are user-experience, and not bugs :)
(apologies for any typos)
Convenient editing
High Priority Request: Change "Save and close" to just "Save".
It's important to provide ability to save draft without ending the edit session. I want the security of saving a draft that i'm not ready to stop editing. Currently, if i want to save and keep editing, i must click your "save and close" button, and then click around a bunch to find and reopen the draft to keep editing it. Awful UX.
Closing the draft is a redundant feature. If you're done editing, just navigate to your next location, such as inbox. There's simply no need to "close" the draft. Change it to just Save.
Otherwise, if you're going to be consistent, then you need to add a "Close" button for reading a received message. But of course you wouldn't do that, because when you're done reading a message, you just navigate to your next location, such as another message. You don't have a "Close" feature on reading a message, and you shouldn't have a "close" feature on editing a draft for exactly the same reason.
Request: CONTROL-S to save a draft. I hate taking my hands off the keyboard when i'm editing. It interrupts my flow.
Protecting My Work
High Priority Request: If i click away without saving, then ask me if i want to save. I've lost more than one draft due to this missing feature. Every software in the world asks you if you want to save. And please DON'T say "Keep it". That's very confusing. If i opened an existing draft, and made some edits, then i may want to lose my new edits but still KEEP THE PREVIOUSLY-SAVED VERSION. I want to keep the original, and lose the changes. But if you say "Keep it", then i'm scared you're asking me if i want to keep the ORIGINAL. It sounds like my only choice is to keep the changes, or lose the original. So then i'm paralyzed.
Request: Auto-save drafts (i'd be surprised if this isn't already in your pipeline). I just noticed something seemed to get auto-saved. If this is already implemented, then there's a defect, cuz i lost several messages which didn't get autosaved, which would make this a Critical Priority item.
Request: PLEASE don't put your "Save my life" button millimeters away from your "Kill myself" button. It's like you're trying to trick me into losing my work. The Discard button should be way far away from the Save button-- like, at the bottom of the message.
Request: Don't confirm to save. On first close-and-save, you don't confirm, you just do it. Good. But on subsquest editing sessions, when i click save-and-close, you ask me if i'm sure. Why? That's annoying and inconsistent. You didn't need to ask me the first time, and you don't need to ask me on subsequent saves either. This is giving me clickitis. Please, just save it! Don't ask me if i'm sure i want to save. No software in the world does this. Yes i'm sure. If i wasn't sure, i wouldn't have clicked the save button.
Request: Don't offer to discard the message if i just clicked Save. This makes no sense. You're still trying to trick me into losing my work. If i wanted to discard, i would have click the Discard button, not the Save button. The "Don't confirm save" request, above, invalidates this request.
Request: Don't offer to save the message if i just clicked Discard. This is the companion-request to the above request. Currently, when you click DIscard, you get "Do you want to Disard, Cancel, or Save?" In other words, the Discard button and the Save button show the exact same options! This isn't a high-priority issue, and if you're sharing code between the Save and Discard buttons just as a temporary, no problem! But if it's an actual design decision, i'm sorry it's terrible.
Icons
Request: A better Save-icon
I have lost a couple drafts because i didn't know how to save. I finally figured out the download-icon is actually the save-icon. Your save icon is the standard internet icon for "Download". Very non-intuitive for save. The message is being composed in a local window, and it will be saved locally. Nothing's being "downloaded".
We've gotta be able to do better. Here are some more bad ideas:
The conventional Save icon is no better: a floppy disk! :D Totally anachronistic. Maybe you're saving to disk, but what's a disk? The icon should be a metaphor that makes sense in the physical world, not an image of computer internals. But at least everyone knows what the floppy disk means.
If you're saving to the cloud, then it's actually being uploaded, not downloaded. But i think an upload icon might suggest sending. Confusing for user.
Hmm "Saving": a life preserver? The Red Cross? Save the children? Saving money? Nah. :D
What is a draft? We're putting a message away for later sending. So maybe a "put into a folder" icon? Except, a user may continue to work on the message after saving. (see "Save, not save-and-close" request above). So we're not necessarily putting it away. "Put into folder" still not quite right, but maybe the best one yet.
THANK YOU !
Johny
