GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 256906
Mail Preferences' General tab adjustments
Last modified: 2021-05-19 12:14:18 UTC
I propose splitting the large “General” tab into two. There may be a good number of tabs already, but the controls are rather random in “General”, the tab label is vague and most importantly the dialog is huge when all these controls end up in a single tab. Part1:Message Display --------------------- http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/product-design/Evolution/screenshots/message-display.png The message display screen is composed of font and various not-so-related display settings. The font setting can be made a lot simpler using the frame control, so to comply with the need to not mix framed and unframed elements, we'll keep the frame for the other controls as well. The font settings have been slightly modified. Instead of fairly vague label “use same font as other applications” which probably ment “use system fonts”, I propose changing the check box to “use custom” (fonts) which is the opposite setting. If marked off, Evolution will use the system fonts defined in the GNOME-global font settings. The font-picker controls are inactive at this setting. Part2:Message Handling ---------------------- http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/product-design/Evolution/screenshots/message%20handling.png Similar to the message display settings, I suggest keeping the frames to separate the two groups of controls. The framing helps to shorten the labels for the radio buttons. I suggest changing the “New Mail Notification” to “Arriving Mail Notification” to explicitly express when the event occurs. The labels should be shortened to help the user evaluate the dialog by scanning (see attachment). The extra control with a label that's used for selecting an audio file to play has been appended to the radio box in the attached mock-up to visually group the controls. There should be enough horizontal space. Also it is advised to make the file selector controls inactive unless the “Play sound” option is selected. It may become too wide for some translations, so perhaps it shouldn't list a complete path, but only the filename. In a longer time frame the best thing again is having a gnome stock sounds, so the widget would list default sounds + enable to browse for a file. Tuomas described this in the alarms spec.
Mockup glade file (all settings): http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/product-design/Evolution/glade/settings.glade
as discussed with nags, changing component to "Misc" to get rid of the UI component, also reassign to Misc-assignee. adding UI keyword.
Apologies for any spam... cc'ing usability-maint on all Evolution usability bugs. Filter on EVO-USABILITY-SPAM to ignore.
hum, evo has changed quite a bit since 1.x what's the status of this bug ? could we have the mockups and other stuff attached here if relevant (they are password protected)?
Attaching the above files.
Created attachment 87879 [details] message handling screenshot
Created attachment 87880 [details] message display screenshot
Created attachment 87881 [details] glade project file
Created attachment 123643 [details] glade-3 mockup of small adjustments of current General tab 0) I was playing with glade-3 to do some small tweaks to the current preferences tabs before I (searched for and) found this bug. 1) While the suggestions of this bug (most of which look valid to me) are considered it might be a good idea to at least tweak the current tab. In my mockup (done in glade-3) the major items are: - relabel the first check box to something like "Use custom fonts for messages" (which flips the internal logic). A similar suggestion was already made above; - indent the "Standard Font:" and "Fixed width Font:" lines as they depend on the first check box (these two labels should also be made insensitive depending on the state of the check box, which they aren't now) - relabel the formatting check box to "Only format messages up to [...] MB in size", to drop the current check (which is negative, thus confusing, and in KB, which is too precise). But it would be _much_ better to drop this option from the GUI altogether. - try to right align some buttons (which actually didn't work out too well).
General tab has now the sections * Start up * Message Display * Delete Mail and no "Notification" anymore, but some pieces are still valid.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new bug report ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.