GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 329823
Feature Request: Icon change to reflect new mail
Last modified: 2013-09-13 00:55:12 UTC
When in a view besides email, it would be nice to get a visual cue that new email has arrived. Right now, you have to keep flipping back to Mail to see if something has come in. The old GW 4.1 used to change the icon to show you that mail has arrived, which was useful. I made a mockup of how this might look, note button in lower left hand corner with envelope sitting in an Inbox, which would appear when something new arrives. Other information:
Created attachment 58663 [details] Icon change mockup to reflect new messages.
very related to bug 259156
Created attachment 96563 [details] [review] proposed evo patch for evolution; This patch adds a support to access sidebar buttons of the main shell, and in this case to change its icon. It can be easily extended to change tooltips too. There is only one thing, I'm not sure with a design of this solution, just say if you have better suggestion where to place and how to name functions/types. (From my point of view, it works just cool. Good suggestion Dave.) ;)
We could also make the taskbar button blink when new mail arrives, much like XChat and Pidgin. I'm sure users would insist on an option for this though.
Yes, I was thinking about it too, but wasn't sure if it isn't disturbing for user. Not every mail is important, so hard to say. Option can help, of course.
Milan, Matthew, sounds fine to me. But blinking the taskbar? May not be a good option. We force the user to switch and read mail. We won't/don't have a mechanism to switch it off otherwise. (like clicking the tray to get it off)
Srini: Question about Milan's patch. Even though Evolution's components are really just shared libraries, does it violate the design for components to directly call EShell functions? I thought all communication between the shell and the components had to happen via Bonobo. The rest of Milan's patch looks solid. I'll test it further over the weekend.
Mbarnes, very much. Just see how the set_title is implemented. It gotto do the same/similar way.
Created attachment 96922 [details] [review] proposed evo patch ][ for evolution; Same thing but with bonobo, so without get_main_shell.
The patch/design looks fine to me. Please compile/test and commit.
Committed to trunk. Committed revision 34374.
Gah, I didn't get around to testing this in time. One thing I wanted to mention is I think the "Mail" button text should also be bolded when new mail arrives, in case the user is using "Text only" switcher appearance.
Also, we really need better looking icon than "stock_mail" for where there are no new messages. The difference in quality between the two icons is stark.
*** Bug 251224 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***