[haiku-development] Re: Working on Haiku's Mail app
- From: "Humdinger" <humdingerb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:48:52 +0100
-- Jorge G. Mare, on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:25:14 -0800:
> > Also, I do find the mail icon informative and visually pleasing as
> > it
> > brings a bit of colour and some needed space.
>
> Ah, I see. It wasn't obvious at first glance; the screenshot where
> the
> read icon appeared above the query icon particularly confused me.
There should be a separator between icons when the query view is
expanded.
> Having
> this status is definitely pleasant to the eye. But I am still not
> sure
> how useful it is in this view, as I would rarely see anyone concerned
> about the status of an email after he/she had already opened it. I
> think
> the same would go about changing the message status: I am pretty sure
> this is an operation most likely to happen in list view.
Not if you consider tagging. You can set the status to e.g. "4later",
"blog", "TYA", "HUG" if you want to keep track of mails to revisit
later, could be a news item for your blog, a commit for a Thank You
Award candidate, or changes concerning the Haiku User Guide.
Add to that the query for "Same Status" and seeing and setting the
status of the current mail becomes interesting.
> Add to this the
> considerable space that the icon takes, perhaps it is not the best
> way
> to invest the limited space you are trying to save. Hmmm... Maybe a
> smaller icon in the menu bar (Tracker style) would be better?
As I said, it's not solely to cramp as much info as possible in the
tiniest space. We already need the horizontal space for the status name
and the vertical for the header info. It can get even a bit wider when
accommodating longer status names. Plus, I consider using a drop-down
menu for the status to make the "Set to..." functionality more obvious.
This would increase the width even a bit more...
Moving the whole status thing to the right, will put it away from the
header-data focus and IMO doesn't look too good besides the encoding
menu.
Since different status don't have different icons (as I somehow
misremembered when thinking about New/Read), another idea I have is to
use an avatar assigned to the From-field's Person file, if available,
else the To-field's (if it differs from your account -> mailing lists),
and only then fall back to the standard mail icon.
I like the idea to put a face to a mail.
-- Attachments
> I understand one of the key goals of this exercise is to maximize the
> message area. From that POV alone, an attachment listing would be
> much
> more effective than the horizontal attachment area: the former does
> not
> reduce the message area in any instance, where the latter does, even
> for
> a single attachment. The attachment list can be displayed only when
> there is an attachment, and hidden when there isn't any; if I am not
> mistaken, I think that's how it works in Thunderbird. :)
The attachment bar would also be hidded if there are none. Most of the
time, a single line bar suffices.
Extending an attachment bar vertically and only reducing the message
area by a few lines is less problematic than resizing header
information horizontally when displaying a list-view beside it.
> All messages from any given individual on any given subject: I do
> this
> very frequently. :)
You could still search "Same Subject" and with one click sort by
"Sender" in the result window.
> I contrast, I never felt the need for
> time-constrained queries, but I can see how it could be useful.
It is. Imagine you remember a mail Axel wrote recently. Searching just
for "Same Sender" will thrash your hd while waiting for the 3000 mails
of the past 7 years to sort themselves into the result window. Limiting
to the past 2 weeks or whatever does help... :)
> Would be nice to have both. :)
IMO, one attribute + time-frame is the most flexible solution and
anything more would take away the advantage of simplicity.
Regards,
Humdinger
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