GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 620044
Reply and Forward actions should have "is-important" set
Last modified: 2010-05-30 03:02:59 UTC
It seems that somewhere in the 2.30 release, most of the toolbar buttons had their labels removed. I believe this to be an usability regression. First, from my testing with non-computer-savy users, those labels are very important because they don't memorize everything. Second, the icons are almost all identical in metaphor. In the case of Send/Receive, Reply, Reply to all and Forward, the only thing that changes is the direction and color of arrows; there's no way to figure out intuitively what that means unless you look at the tooltip or label. My suggestion: Prioritize (enable the button label) for: - Reply - Forward - Delete (not surprisingly, this button being similar in metaphor to the Junk icon is a cause of problems) Optional, but could be prioritized too: - New - Print Not necessary (would benefit from having their labels taken out to save space): - Send/receive (especially in languages other than English). I would assume here that most users have Evolution auto-check the mail anyway. Environments that are really tight for horizontal space could simply toggle gtk's setting to have icons-only toolbars. But even on a 1024x600 screen, I find that you Evolution 2.28's style has no problem fitting in. While I'm here, I'll just mention that http://people.gnome.org/~michael/images/2010-05-27-meego-mail.png is an example of bad use of icons. Nearly all the buttons' icons there are in the shape of an envelope, which defeats their purpose of being easily recognizeable (see http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/icons-design.html.en ; "Make Icon Silhouettes Distinct"). But that's a separate icon theme problem, not really Evolution. It serves only to reinforce my point about requiring labels for similar icons that are used often.
This was a desktop-wide change in GNOME 2.30 affecting all GTK+ applications. If you want the old style back, change your GConf key /desktop/gnome/interface/toolbar_style to "both".
This is not an Evolution specific issue and Evolution will not provide separate settings then the GNOME wide ones, hence closing.
No, you misunderstood the issue. This is a change that occured between Evolution 2.28 and 2.30. On the same machine. Same gtk settings. This is not about the global gtk settings, it is about specifying the is_important property onto the individual buttons. Seems the ones being considered important have changed, and this is what this bug report is about. See bug #575963 for an example of the same kind of issue that was solved in PiTiVi. Or take a look at the Human Interface Guidelines at figure 5.4 in http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/toolbars-labels-tooltips.html.en
Created attachment 162282 [details] comparing evolution 2.28 to 2.30 And here is a screenshot comparing the two Evolution versions. As you can see, the Reply/Reply all/Forward buttons have lost their labels.
I see what you mean now, thanks for the clarification. The toolbar in 2.30 was supposed to look like 2.28, but I rewrote all the menus and toolbars and must have missed that detail. Unfortunately I can't fix this in 2.30 because the UI is frozen, so committing a fix for 2.31 only. http://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution/commit/?id=da3b1942ea34514871a404b1530ff785d0e4e549
A fix in 2.31.x is fine. Thank you very much :) Just a check though: does this fix also apply to the individual message windows (when you don't use the previewer pane) or does it affect only the "main" window?
Both windows.