On Friday, 20 March 2015 17:05:59 CET, Thomas Lübking wrote:
I'd rather move the toolbar to the right hand.
On the left, it resembles the look of many vertical tab bars
(eg. think of opera) and most of the actions are related to the
current (selected and likely open) mail.
Also the connection status would end up on the lower right edge again.
I've been running with this since Fri when you suggested it. I have mixed
feeling, it has "felt wrong" for a long time. Maybe I'm just too used to
the pattern of scrollbar-at-far-right, bothered by the visual alignment of
the icons (too much space at right due to the expand arrow of QToolButton),
or confused by the strangeness of this. On the other hand, it also looks
sort of cool, the connection thingy is at the right place :), and you're
right about the fact that message manipulators close to the actual message
content make a lot of sense. (Should we maybe integrate these into a
message's header?)
My DE's main panel is at the right edge of the screen, btw (so that the
clock is Where It Should Always Be at the bottom right). So it isn't me
being shy of the right edge -- I like it. I just don't like the
appearance/"feel" of Trojita with main toolbar at right. As I said, I have
mixed feelings. I think that it is a bit weird.
I will admit that I usually use shortcuts, but the actions
might require regrouping (for they're not grouped as above ;-)
That makes sense. Maybe hiding the expunge button a bit -- it's a
destructive thing, and having it right between "creating" stuff
(new/draft/reply) is a bit ugly, IMHO.
If Qt allowed reasonably simple embedding of toolbars into arbitrary
"docking areas" in generic widgets, then we could have a small toolbar with
"global actions" (new mail, expunge, conn. status) at the top of the
mailbox tree area. Or maybe it would be too confusing to split toolbars
like this?
I'd (still) suggest to combine the settings stuff in one button
(that has, as I envision it¹, no drastic impact on the a11y of
the connection status) and put that on the far end (where the
conneciton is right now)
I'm mostly OK with moving additional menus underneath a prominent button
like that.
I'd also suggest to put the expunge next to that,
I don't know what exactly you're proposing here.
because the
concept is "initially" strange, flag whether an expunge is known
to be "required" (mails marked deleted) and ask the user whether
to expunge when closing the window (hinting button and shortcut
and maybe along a "yes, I know what IMAP is, please don't ask me
again" checkbox)
An auto-suggestion for expunging (and first of all, calling it something
like "Expunge deleted messages" instead of just "expunge") on e.g. mailbox
switching or app's exit sounds nice.
One option is to go the Firefox route and automatically
display it when user presses Alt, hiding the menu bar
otherwise.
Bad discoveribility:
you've a secret UI element which only shows when you press a
secret shortcut.
I agree on the discoverability front
Bad usability:
Showing/hiding the menubar (on top) moves the GUI - imagine how
nasty that is if you just want to use Alt for some (global or
trojitá) shortcut.
Firefox' way doesn't actually interfere with usability. The menu pops up on
Alt's release, and I imagine only if no other shortcut matches.
Another option is hiding this menu behind a toolbar icon.
Bad integration:
it's a regression for OSX users (or everyone else with menubars on top ;-)
Can we detect it programatically whether the style puts the menu out of the
app window? If so, then we obviously should not hide it when the menu bar
is outside.
The connection overlay could be sth. like a green "✔", a red
"!" and a yellow/orange "$" (or "€", given the currency still
exists on the next trojitá release :-P) - we could even i18n the
latter to allow "¥", "£", etc.) - the glyph can also be outlined
(ie. yellow w/ a black frame, red and green w/ a white)
Hard to tell how well this would work without trying it out. Random
brainstorming:
- ignore user's style, always use hamburger
- when busy, animate the vertical bars which build up the pictogram, or
show a spinner around the hamburger
- dark green hamburger == connected
- red = disconnected
- yellow = expensive mode
- I don't know how well the animated bars would look like, especially with
colored bars
Cheers,
Jan
--
Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/
