Philippe Bossut wrote:

Also, in the case of an e-mail app, this allows to display a longer list of e-mails in the central area so you indeed don't feel the need to move any splitter. This is arguably different in the case of a calendar.

I have to voice my dissenting opinion here: I have tried many times over the past few years to use a three-column layout (as I call it) like chandler (currently) has and it drives me absolutely batty.

I completely agree that narrow columns are easy to read, but I get a lot of HTML-based e-mail that is often simply too wide for a three-column layout... and in fact the mere presence of a horizontal scroll bar is annoying to me. Further, I use quicksearch in Thunderbird quite a bit, and so I generally don't have much of a need to see more than 5-10 messages at a time. In fact, when I try the three column layout, showing 30+ message titles at a time is actually too much information for me.

I actually have almost the opposite of what you guys are talking about:

+---------+----------+
|         |          |
| Folders | Messages |
|         |          |
+---------+----------+
|                    |
|   Message Body     |
|                    |
+--------------------+

This is vaguely like iTunes in that the upper panes are used to narrow down your search and the "message body" is where the real content you're interested in lies. (in the case of iTunes, a playlist or list of songs is the "real content")

This is not to say that my way is better, but rather that I have some pretty specific, valid reasons for preferring this format over chandler's existing layout. (This crosses into the "preference" realm, ironically, and thunderbird does get by with allowing the user to change this, without going to a preferences window)

Alec

Cheers,
- Philippe
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design

Reply via email to