GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 501354
Make the menu less busy by having less *-new icons in dropdown menu
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:37:46 UTC
If you press the first button on evolution's toolbar, you are presented with a list of many actions like composing mail etc. Some of those icons have yet to be done in Tango style. Those icons are: # All Day Appointment # Meeting # Task # Assigned Task # Memo # Shared memo # Contact List # Memo List # Task List All of this are actually "new" actions (actions that are meant to create a new ~), so they should have the star emblem in the upper right corner. Tango icons that are missing this stat at the moment: # Calendar (which should be shipped in g-i-t?)
Created attachment 100144 [details] Screenshot This shows the menu for all the components. Is it really clever to include ALL actions for every component? IMHO creating a new task doesn't belong in the mail view at all. Removing the items that do not belong into a given component would make the menu more usable for me, as less information would distract me from what I want to find I think... This would also be another step in the direction of component separation.
What do you think Andreas?
This looks really, really cluttered. All the graphics everywhere makes the whole thing hard to read. :( We probably want to kill a bunch (all?) of the icons here.
I agree that we should prioritize which items are the most used and clear most of the icons from the menus. Having every single item have an icon is visual noise.
To cut down on the number of items in the New menu but still keep it functional, I'd say start by eliminating the "super" objects from foreign components: Address Book / Calendar / Mail Folder / Memo list / Task list By that I mean "Mail Folder" should only appear when you're in Mail, "Task list" should only appear when you're in Tasks, etc. My guess is users don't use these items very much. They're more likely to switch components and right-click something. Just a hunch; that's what I always do. Next, eliminate groups of objects that can be converted from one to the other on the fly. Example: "Appointment" vs. "All Day Appointment". No need for both when you can do New -> Appointment and click "All Day Event" to make it an All Day Appointment. So remove "All Day Appointment" from the New menu. I wonder if we could make that happen for other related pairs. "Task" vs. "Assigned Task" and "Memo" vs. "Shared Memo" look like easy targets. CC'ing Srini for his thoughts.
Just a confusion. Are we discussing of the menus+icons or the number of menus? I agree to Matt's point that we can cut a few menus. Matt, your approach seems fine to me. On your Task vs Assigned Task. THe task lags a "Assign" tool button which when done, can be purged in foreign menus
The idea was to make the menu less busy. If we can in fact get rid of many of the menu items by merging some of theme and only displaying them in the relevant component view anyway, I think we have achieved this goal very nicely and can kepp icons for the rest of them.
To sum things up, the proposal would be to do this: Mail - Mail Message (icon from g-i-t) - Mail Folder (icon from g-i-t) Contacts - Contact (icon from g-i-t) - Contact List => multiple contact cards? - Adress Book (icon from g-i-t) Calendars - Appointment (icon from g-i-t) - All Day Appointment => Remove from menu - Meeting => keep the current metaphor? (bodyparts... but anyway) - Calendar => calendar mime icon from g-i-t + star? Memos - Memo => single tomboy-like note item with star? - Shared memo => Remove from menu - Memo list => stacked tomboy-like note with a star? Tasks - Task => jimmac has nice task icons somewhere - Assigned Task => see Sriniva's comment. No icon for now, remove menuitem later - Task list => zoomed in list with a few checkmarks? IMHO this would be a great solution and simplify the menu a lot. If a few people are interested in having all component's actions accessible from anywhere, perhaps a plugin could easily provide this functionality?
Does the icons for Meeting, Contact list or Task list appear anywhere else in the evolution interface?
Meeting I don't know, Contact list or Task list do appear at least in context menus.
Bumping version to a stable release.
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