some thoughts and comments on the proposed changes:
* like most, I'd enthusiastically support killing the shortcut bar. I never use it and find it pretty ugly to look at -- in OL or Evo. Your screenshots begin to suggest a more interesting way to handle the basic problem.
* I also support, a little more reluctantly, killing the summary page. I really like the idea, but never use it in practice. As mentioned previously, the calendar and task views aren't that useful. the email view doesn't do anything for me at all. One thing that I would love to see, though, would be an embedded RSS viewer. I really dig the idea of doing RSS feed viewing in Evo (similar to how others used to use mail programs for news groups). However, for that feature to be useful, it wouldn't link to a web browser, but be an RSS program in its own right, similar to Straw. However, if Ximian is looking to reduce Evo's compexity, then I suspect this wouldn't be a desirable change.
* in the next UI design, would you consider being able to toggle between Evo's current 3 pane layout into one similar to the proposed Outlook 2003? In as much
as I use preview pane, I actually like the larger fully vertical preview pane layout
design that MS is using. I'd suggest it as an optional toggle, rather than a de facto
layout change.
* is it safe to assume that each of your new buttons will pull up full enumerations of each of the sources for each application? namely, that the mail button pull up all of your mail accounts. calendar pull up all your calendars. contacts pulls up all of you contact sources. As long as a full enumeration of all accounts is consistent across all of those apps, the new button navigation looks like it'd be a pretty graceful design. (it looks like your screen shots suggests this, but I wanted to be certain).
* the To: and CC: fields should be to search and auto-complete against the default Contact source, similar to Outlook (rather than always having to use the search
function).
* how viable would it be to create a Global Address Book browser for the
Ximian Connector?
* as someone else has mentioned, a real Notes/Memo editor program would
be lovely. ;-)
* Ettore just beat me to another request, arbitrary order for the folders, rather than hard-coded alphabetical order. my default mail account is always towards the bottom of the nav bar because of the alphabetical ordering. this is also an irritation w/ vfolders, you create them because you want easy to use/prominent sorting/reordering/aggregation, and then they get stuck down at the bottom of the nav bar.
* this is a more dramatic feature request than just UI (but I'm on a roll), have you considered DAV-enabling Evolution or Ximian Connector to be able to work w/ the forth-coming Sharepoint integration of Outlook/Exchange? Another nice feature
in Outlook XP/2003 (that is very specific to an Exchange environment) is the
ability to schedule Meetings that are Exchange Conference Server-enabled (online meetings that can book against Conference Server resources. w/ RTC supplanting some of the Conference Server functionality, this may a harder issue to figure out.
* Last, ensuring that Ximian Connector will continue to work w/ Exchange 2003's
revised MAPI architecture and MS's own implementation of RPC-over-HTTP.
jeff
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
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