First off, let me start by saying that I use Evolution as my mail client both at work (nasa) and at home.
Personnally, I use the shortcut bar primarily to keep track of the 30 folders I use regularly in a way that I have control on their order. The fact that it's not alphabetic and I have a way to hide folders that I don't use (perhaps old mail I still keep for records purposes). Aside from that it looks nice, and my only other comment is I don't care what it looks like as long as you make the damn ldap lookup/autocomplete work properly. Apparently our ldap server here sends a couple of fields that evo doesn't know how to handle properly, and that causes errors when trying to use ldap sources to look up address via autocomplete and the to/cc buttons. I'd gladly give up the nice organization the shortcut bars give me if it meant I could have ldap autocomplete work. On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 18:44, Ettore Perazzoli wrote: > Hello! > > Here at Ximian we have been brainstorming a bit about what happens > next in the Evolution world. One of the ideas that has come up is a > substantial overhaul of Evolution's UI. > > Since images speak better than words, here are the mockups for some > designs that Anna has developed: (this is just to give a very rough > idea of what it would be like; the icons and labels are not final, the > widgets are not the real ones etc.) > > http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_contacts.png > http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_calendar.png > http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_mail.png > http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_tasks.png > http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/evo2_navbar_shrunk.png > > The most important changes are: > > * You no longer see all the types of folders at once. You > switch between calendar, mail, tasks and contacts by > clicking on the buttons at the bottom. > > * The calendar allows you to see multiple calendar at once. > Also you can subscribe to web calendars and see them in the > pane on the left as well. > > There are a few reasons for us to go with this design: > > * It kills the all-in-one tree view, which currently makes it > difficult to reach for your calendar or contacts folders, > since they are hiding between all the various mail folders. > You no longer need to hunt for you calendar folder scrolling > through the tree to see what your schedule is like, you just > click on an easily accessible button marked "Calendar". > Much better navigation. (Please note that, although it's > not obvious from the mockup, we would still have a mail > folder tree, the same way we have it now. Calendar, Tasks > and Contacts, however, would be just flat lists.) > > * Killing the tree view also simplifies the architecture a > lot. Right now there is a lot of machinery in place to > handle the tree, making sure that components don't step on > each other's toes. In particular, the handling of local > folders is a maintenance nightmare, and also makes it very > hard to provide the hooks that hackers need eg. to access > Evolution's folders and do cool desktop integration hacks. > > * The shell's APIs would be drastically reduced to just > a couple calls and it would become a lot simpler to > implement new components. > > * This design simplification would also allow components to be > launched independently from each other. We could > potentially even launch the shell without certain components > (e.g. launch only the mailer) if the user wants it that way. > If we wanted to have separated apps a la OS X we could > trivially do that too. > > * As I mentioned, it allows side-by-side calendar viewing, > which increases the usability of the calendar manyfold. > > On the other hand, if we go this way we are probably also going to > drop the following features: > > * The summary. While the summary is neat, there is a general > feeling (at least amongst the developers) that the mail and > calendar summaries are not tremendously useful, and that > weather and RDF and weather information is better suited for > a specialized application. Also we are trying to reduce the > amount of code we have to maintain, and this seems like a > good candidate for trimming. > > * The shortcut bar. It's been shown that only a relatively > small part of the Evolution user community actually uses it, > and we feel that it unnecessarily complicates the UI. The > new design is much simpler to navigate anyways, and the > shortcut bar would add clutter and complexity, both in code > and UI. Also, it wouldn't be easy to implement in this > model without keeping some of the shell's complexity that > we would like to get rid of. > > Opinions? > > -- Ettore > _______________________________________________ > evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution -- Sean M. Alderman ITRACK Systems Analyst PACE/NCI - NASA Glenn Research Center (216) 433-2795 Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive. _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
