[haiku-development] Re: Working on Haiku's Mail app
- From: "Jorge G. Mare" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:11:28 -0800
Hi Joachim!
Humdinger wrote:
I just hid the button bar, because it wasn't concerned by the proposed
changes.
Since it can be hidden, it's not the best place for header info like
the status.
Yes, but a "before and after" comparison is only meaningful if the
"before" is shown how it really looks in its original state -- the
default state -- and with all its essential elements, which the button
bar is. :)
Anyway, I was actually not suggesting that the status itself be
displayed in the bottom bar, but that the functionality to change the
status (visual + popup menu) be placed in the button bar. Since this bar
is already used for buttons that provide visual shortcuts to various
operations such print, delete, reply, and forward, it seems like the
most logical place for a change status button/icon.
As explained, it doesn't take much space, no additional vertical space,
and looks good.
Especially for mailing lists is nice as the avatar would practically
show the somewhat hidden To-field.
If any of the fields become "somewhat hidden," it's probably because
something else is taking too much space. :)
But moving GUI elements around makes the interface noisy. I'd prefer to
lose one line for the mail contents than having e.g. the subject line
trunkated because the list of attachments compresses everything
horizontally. Email being traditionally 80 chars wide, limits the
useful window width.
Yes, but that's actually an argument for having more (and not less)
vertical space, as the email messages (in the Haiku mail app) don't use
the full width of the window and thus stretch further vertically, making
that vertical space even more precious. IOW, space-wise, displaying
messages is more expensive vertically than horizontally, so it makes
sense to try to maximimize vertical space as much as possible. :)
The wider displays are better used by Stack&Tiling e.g. a query window
beside it.
Correct me if I am wrong, but if two windows are tiled, they share the
same width; so, how is this relevant?
Of course we can always wish for some solution that can parse ten
thousands of files instantly and some clever software solution to sort
them all without much computation...
But even so: If you know you're looking for a mail of sometime last
month, why would you want to go through a file list of 10.000 entries.
Back in the day, when I used to demo ZETA at various events and
conferences (remember the good old days BGA?! :) ), that's exactly what
I used to do: I had 30 - 40K emails, I would run queries with multiple
criteria that would give me anything between a few dozen to several
hundred hits, and it worked reasonably well to support the claim of live
queries. You make it sound like only a miracle would make this possible
in Haiku, but I think it's more a matter of giving the devs time to
resolve the existing issues; hopefully I am not being naively optimistic
here... :)
BTW, I really like your proposed layout for the writing mode; it is much
tidier and compact than the existing layout. Way to go!
Cheers,
Jorge/aka Koki
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