GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 308815
Colors for categories can't be changed
Last modified: 2013-09-13 00:57:15 UTC
Please describe the problem: when I try to edit or create a "Category" for the tasks and try to change the color it doesn't work. I can change the color and it shows up in the dialog. But when I press ok and look into the category again it's set to black again. Steps to reproduce: 1. Create a new task 2. Click on the "Category..." Button 3. Select a category and edit it (or create a new one) 4. Change the color (it will change now) 5. Press ok and finish the task Actual results: The color won't have changed and if you check it again it's also saved as black Expected results: That the color of the category has changed and my task appears in the chosen color. Does this happen every time? yes Other information:
confirming this on evolution-2.2.3.0.200506100320-0.snap.ximian.10.1, suse9.2. targetting to 2.3.
this still exists in 2.4.1. Has this been looked at?
retargetting
*** Bug 322143 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
updating target milestone, upgrading severity - it's totally useless currently.
still valid in evo 2.5.91. color gets changed in the dialog, but does not get applied - still the old color if the dialog is opened for a second time.
still valid in evo 2.7.1. retargetting.
*** Bug 343402 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
reassigning chakravarthi's bugs to avoid rotting.
Andre, thank you for the super-fast reply. Thank you for the work-around. I hope this color problem can be solved very soon. In the monochrome layout of the calendar it is difficult to distinguish between the categories (i.e. "vacation", "work", etc.).
harmonizing target milestones, sorry for the noise. (2.6.x -> 2.6)
categories's color is no where used and just the icons are used. Im not sure, what was in the mind, when it was implemented. Im not sure, how to use the colors. What color to use, if more than one category is selected. I would prefer to remove colors from categories and go ahead. I remember harish suggested the same on some bug. harish?
I would very much like to kindly urge the developpers to DO try and implement colors for categories. It will make your calandar/agenda MUCH clearer. In other calendar programs I use colors extensively. This is, in my opinion, very important if Evolution is ever to be as widely used as, say, Outlook. Every category and every appointment having the same color makes the layout of Evolution look unclear/vague.
Maneer, currently you can assign multiple categoris to events. What color can u use, if each category has a color? I feel, the color makes no sense with the current assignment of categories to events/contacts.
Maneer , this bug had to deal with two issues: 1. making the color change for categories reflected when u open the categories for editing again 2. setting the task color the same as that of the categories. i've fixed the first part... but wat puzzles me is wat color shd i set to the task when i have more than one category?? ud it not be better if u were to use different task lists instead? evo has different colors for different task lists.. n as for outlook, i am new to it n i cudnt find any colors for categories there as well.... which i think is most sensible...
Y'all are right. I did not realize that one can assign multiple categories to one appointment/task/agenda-item. Indeed, the question is which color to use then... (I NEVER use two categories for one item. Seems a bit odd to me....) I remember using my Psion and a PIM (personal information manager, probably Lotus Organizer...) in which I gave my vacations the color green and important meetings the color red. In one glance, I could see if I mistakingly scheduled a meeting in my vacation. This is possible in Outlook too. In Outlook that is called a "LABEL". And labels have colors (categories have not...)! Maybe the color of the first category can be set as the background color of the appointment? Or maybe the "label" option can be introduced in Evolution too? I really like the Month View with different colors for vacations, anniversaries, meetings, etc. Try it and you'll know what I mean. Really. :)
*** Bug 359130 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Ubuntu bug about that: https://launchpad.net/products/evolution/+bug/52816
Created attachment 74854 [details] [review] Submitting patch.
*** Bug 367071 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Same problem here - I just merged my duplicate bug into this one. Please fix it, devs! It's really nice to see different types of appointments in different colors. I'm using the icons for now, but would be nice to have colors.
The patch does not work properly. It also causes a crash.
Same problem here: (Evolution 2.8.2.1 on FC6) If some people like to allow multiple categories for a single item (event/task/contact etc.) (seems silly to me, but I can almost see why) then any of the following are surely reasonable solutions: (approximately increasing preference with number) 1. Force a choice between colouring the item OR allowing multiple categories 2. Let the software choose the colour if multiple categories are selected for a single item 3. Give the user a list of colours in a drop-down menu in an item's dialogue box (made up of the colours of the categories to which it is a member) resulting in the automatic colouring for people who want it, those that don't won't have gone to the trouble of setting category colours in the first place. It would also be nice to have the option different category sets (probably through enabling or disabling) for the address book, calendar, memos etc. (how many contacts do you have in your "To Do" or "Ideas" category). This should also improve compatibility with the Palm OS calendar software. I know these are technically feature requests, however it appears that it is the lack of one of these that is probably (indirectly) the cause of the bug.
*** Bug 402091 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 382740 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 90749 [details] [review] proposed eds patch for evolution-data-server; it's only to allow save/load colors with categories, those colors are need to be used (somehow) in evolution itself, as next step. This patch also contains a fix for runtime warning: (evolution:789): e-data-server-CRITICAL **: e_categories_get_icon_file_for: assertion `cat_info != NULL' failed which is very very annoying for me and is not necessary. :)
Created attachment 90750 [details] [review] proposed eds patch for evolution-data-server; almost same as that previous one, but here if one choose pure black (rgb(0,0,0)) then the color is unset (clear) from the category. (I meant "don't save pure black color")
Created attachment 90754 [details] [review] proposed eds patch for evolution-data-server; one more annoying runtime warning removal, now in e_categories_get_color_for
Created attachment 90755 [details] [review] proposed evo patch for evolution; it uses rather color based on category for the event for day/month view, but in list view is still used calendar color. It will use calendar color in day/month view too when there are selected more categories with colors in the event (notice, it's not same as more categories, because some categories don't need to have selected color).
Hi Milan, first of all thank you for your work on this bug. how can i add this patch into my evolution? do i have to compile evolution with the changed files of your patch? i have ubuntu, can you explain how i can use your patch on the easiest way? Thank you, Toni
hi toni, you would have to compile evolution from source with the patch included. warning: compiling from source is not trivial. :-)
Hi Toni, Andre has right, it is not trivial, also not much complicated, but I will rather try to persuade evolution developers to review this, maybe fix some issue they find there, and then it will be included in new release. But it will take some time, we will see.
Would somebody that has the vision of how it should look like would do us the favor of attaching a mockup (even gross). I don't quite see how to mix the color of the task list with the color of the categories.
Hi Gilles Dartiguelongue One way is to do it like sunbird with the colored border. I don't prefer it, but it works... The other way could be to make ist configurable. So the user can decide from where the color should be taken (from category or tasklist). I think this way is better. @developers I work with Evolution 2.10.1 on a Ubuntu feisty and the problem still exists. Can somebody change the target milestone. thx
*** Bug 456205 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 458057 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 92195 [details] [review] patch in eds the patch fixes only the 'color-sticking' for categories..
How to show colors of categories? What if an event has 10 categories and has in turn 10 colors to be shown? Anything idea to show this is a better way? Icons do a good job here. I wondered why was this colors added and not used anywhere. I propose we should remove this. Any thoughts?
How about sorting the categories? Pick the first one that is marked as the one giving the color. I personally believe that having colors is a lot easier to figure out what MAIN category an appointment belongs to. Personal - Green Business - Red Those would be my topmost categories. Down the road I would add less important ones.
May be you are saying category ranking. That is a different requirement altogether. Even then, I dont think it can support/vote for colors for categories. I strongly feel that icons are doing a good job and color aren't there anyway today in the visual cue and lets remove it from the editor also.
Hmm, OK I can understand why you are against colors for categories. BUT will you add LABELS instead that have colors? Like Outlook and all other Calendar software does? I feel not pretty happy with the small icons and if I set a couple of them I can not easily see which ones are important, or if I am busy or if they are private etc. Color scheming is a lot easier to grasp. Just for the fun try to add 10 categories to a busy weeks schedule and then tell me with one look which days have 1 specific set. But if you have set a color scheme for exactly this one it will be right there in your face. Like the Personal - Green and Business - Red example I gave.
Carstem, labels/tags are nice concepts. We need to make a proposal on how we gonna implement them and showcase it. It lot depends on the proposal and the functional specification. If the spec can make a unambiguous proposal with colors, I'm not against it really.
I guess the easiest (in my humble opinion) would be to stick to the categories as they are (with the corresponding colors). For the labels/tags create a second pulldown list in which you can select ONE single category. From that category you take the color and show it in the calendar. That was there is no need to change the code for the categories. You would have one additional field to save for each appointment and one pulldown chooser for the label/tag.
*** Bug 398520 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 485542 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 97703 [details] [review] proposed eds patch ][ for evolution-data-server; after a discussion with srag about this bug on IRC, here's a patch to drop colors from categories. All related functions are marked deprecated and one deprecated function 'e_categories_add_with_color' has been added to be able to use function like before (when not disabled deprecated), and to be able to use 'e_categories_add' every time, without any knowledge of EDS_DISABLE_DEPRECATED. There is also fixed one runtime critical warning which was shown when editing category without icon.
Created attachment 97704 [details] [review] proposed evo patch ][ for evolution; Prototype of 'e_categories_add' function has been changed, so make this change in our code too.
Milan, rejected. You have broken the API e_category_add. Not acceptable. Deprecate that and add another one to do with out color.
Created attachment 98570 [details] [review] proposed eds patch ]I[ for evolution-data-server; evo patch is no longer needed, because after a discussion on IRC we decided to deprecate only a parameter 'color' of 'e_categories_add', renaming to 'unused', because any other new function will have a suffix, which will/can invoke thought that there is other method to add a category, but that one is deprecated.
Hello , I am STRONGLY in favour for the colour coding and these are my proposals for dealing with this issue: 1) Srini had mentioned about the feasiblity for a colour ranking. IT CAN BE DONE!! Assign priority in the form of integers to the category colours and break ties by checking the highest bit set for each of the categories. If at a stage, two categories have the highest bit set , then check for the next bit and so on..And since no two categories have the same priority , this WILL yield a solution. And all these bitwise operations should be pretty easy to code and will take up little memory. There are 22 categories( Phew, isn't that a lot?? ) and the priorities would have to be decided over IRC by both clients and devs. 2) Remove the category colours and bring in the concept of label colouring like Outlook. This too should not be difficult. Just remove the color field from the structure of the category and add an additional data structure label and the user may choose only one label which means , only one colour, and voila, we have a solution :) Eagerly awaiting all your comments on this. (Its been a long time, Srini and Andre. Looking forward to hearing from you guys) Cheers :)
Arvind, Again, as I said, this would mostly match with priority rather than categories. My basic point is that if two categories have two colors then what to do? If we want to go by colors of item, the theme for calendar/tasks/memo colors would go off. I still feel that outlook way is a bit different. They have color bubbles attached to a event, the way we attach icons in it. The event would take the color of the calendar which makes it much easier and icons rather than colors is a better way to understand categories IMO. I'm going with this for now, for 2.22. Milan, I think you can commit this to head. One correction +/* 'unused' parameter was 'icon', but it is deprecated now (see bug #308815) */ was 'color' :)
Committed to trunk. Committed revision 8243. How this happened? Hmmmm :)
Hi Srinivasa, well in my work environment we have no permissions to create a couple of calendars. We are stuck with ONE and only ONE exchange calendar. This makes your approach of color coding different calendars pretty difficult. And seeing the difference between a couple of small icons which have essentially the same color is not making it easier. I would have liked to see something like color coded labels, but it seems like we are not getting them. :-(
I share in every way the point of view of comment #13: "I would very much like to kindly urge the developpers to DO try and implement colors for categories. It will make your calandar/agenda MUCH clearer. In other calendar programs I use colors extensively. This is, in my opinion, very important if Evolution is ever to be as widely used as, say, Outlook. Every category and every appointment having the same color makes the layout of Evolution look unclear/vague." Still valid in evolution 2.12.1 ubuntu 07.10.
*** Bug 519156 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 528925 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I also have to join with all the people here that consider category colors essential for using the application. As far as I know, the option exists in pretty much every other rfc2445 compliant PIM. Why change it? The little icons are completely incapable of distinguishing all the categories in my full week calendar. Colors are hugely better at this. Colored categories let me get a overview of my week in a second. Icons make me use at least 10 to go over every single appointment. Also don't split colors into another thing (labels whatever). It should be possible to make them go hand in hand with rfc's categories. I sync my calendar with my phone where I use categories as well and do not intend to start manually coloring/labeling every appointment. Just make the categories for an event sortable and show the color of the first category. This really isn't that hard. I will downgrade to last working evolution for now and I really beg you to fix this bug. There really aren't any good open-source pims for me to migrate at the moment. Yogiz
Yogiz, AFAIK, there was no impl for colors in Evo. It was just the UI lying there. So, even if you downgrade, there is nothing much gonna be there, except the UI. Or I'm not clearly getting the point. Note that calendars already have colors. And that is used a lot than this. How is thing gonna be merged with multiple catergory colors. If I have a convincing answer/proposal for this, Im really not against it. At the end, I dont want to disappoint any user, at the same time, dont want a confusing UI. Thanks.
You are indeed correct and I found out, that downgrade will not be an option. The problem with using different calendars as categories (colors) is that they're quite hard to sync with the cell phone as the latter can only use one calendar. I would suggest you add the option for color categories in the preferences, configurability is something in my opinion, that you can not have too much of on a large software project such as Evolution. As for multiple categories and colors, I already proposed, make categories sortable and only show the color of the topmost one. I think that would work out quite well, don't you think? I would not like to go off-topic, but it seems to me, that lately the developers assume too much, to what the user wants. I'd really suggest to make the software as possibly configurable as it can be. I for one would like to be able to compile evolution without the mail part and just use it as a pim. Also the 3D view of appointments should be possible to turn off. I haven't found an option for that eighter. <\rant> The off-topic part can be ignored but I'd be interested if the color categories could still be re-implemented.
Yogiz, for the 3D view, you can disable/adjust a few things like gradient (Make it look like 3d), transparency etc. But you cant go back to old view. Do you mean to say that have a conf to say, Use colors from categories/calendars while drawing appt? Sounds fine. But how would you solve the multiple categories colors then. we can have color bubbles in the appt of all the categories, but dont render the appt in one of the colors from category. It is actually loss of information and it can mislead. You need to have category ranking to tell which one to take out of the existing category colors.
Yes, I mean to have such a configuration option. I'm not sure I got the rest correctly. Let's say there are three categories and colors defined for them: Personal (blue), work (red) and misc (white). Now when I create an appointment and select only one of these categories app is rendered in this color. If I select more then one, I can sort the categories for the app. When I select all three categories for an app then I could be able to drag and drop these categories in a list. The app will be rendered in the color of the topmost category. Categories: work misc app is rendered in red Categories misc personal work app is rendered in white. I'm also for the icons as they exist right now. That can give more detailed overview of the categories on a closer inspection but they're not as good for general sorting as colors. Hope I made myself clear : ).
OK, since this issue is being discussed again I would like to put my 0.2 cent into it. How about borders? Color the border with the calendar color and the background with the category color. If a user wishes so he could swap the two. Make it configurable. This way you have both in one go. The color coding for the calendar and the color coding for the category. I also vote for the category sorting.
Nikiel's idea would work out just fine for me. If you need a quick way to distinguish the different calendars then that would be a good way to do so. Always make things more configurable rather then less. That should be the beauty of open-source.
*** Bug 272860 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Carsten Nikiel's would also be a good solution to me! Another way would be to decide in the preferences if you would like to use colors for categories or calendars. The categorie-icons are nice but not as good to see.