GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 350932
The Evolution Account Assistant - Mail Configuration is too tall.
Last modified: 2011-07-01 15:46:34 UTC
Please describe the problem: I cannot reach the "Forward" button at the bottom of this screen. I cannot make the screen shorter so that I can reach or even see this button either. Steps to reproduce: 1. I am using a Samsung SyncMaster 753DF monitor and an nVidia NV11 GeForce 2MX video card running at 1024x768 resolution. 2. Click on the Edit Screen, then go down and click on the Preferences screen 3. When the Evolution Preferences screen comes up click on the "Add" button at the right of the screen. 4. Try to move the screen up so as to see the bottom of the screen. FAIL! Try to resize the screen - I can make it taller, but not shorter. In either case, I cannot even see the "Forward" button that the message in the middle of the screen says that I need to click. FAIL! Actual results: I cannot reach the "Forward" button to begin adding an email account. Expected results: That I could see and click the "Forward" button. Does this happen every time? yes. I have tried to change the screen resolution, but that doesn't help either. Other information: No. I can't think of anything.
where is the preferences screen located at your dekstop when it comes up? centered? or does it change everytime? if you cannot move that window, it really sounds like your window manager is broken, so this would not be an evolution problem. :-/
The preferences screen comes up in the middle of the monitor screen. I can move the preference screen just fine. At least I can move it up until the top of the preference screen hits the top of the overall Evolution screen then it won't move up any further. That is, I cannot move the top of the preference screen up past the top of the desktop. If I could I could probably reach the bottom of the screen and see the button that I need to press. I can resize the screen somewhat. I can make it wider, but not narrower than an certain extent. I can also make the preference screen taller but not small small enough to reach the bottom of the screen even when the top of the preference screen is at the top of the desktop. All of the other screens in Evolution seem to be sized correctly although I doubt that I have checked every one. Just this screen is giving me fits. If I can't get this fixed, I'll have to use some other email client. I can't configure new email addresses in this one.
Should we make an 800x600 resolution tracker bug? Or are all these bugs actually talking about the same window? (Bug 350932, bug 239706, bug 244429, bug 267787, and bug 262546?)
Elijah, they are not talking about the same window: one is the preferences (it's my personal pet peeve, I mean it's bigger than 1024x768, wtf!), some other is about the wizards, etc. It is, however, the same issue in general: evolution not having been designed to fit anything below 1280x800 or something like that, which is a bad thing and plagues the whole application. What's preventing Evo from having smaller dialogs? In the case of the preferences window, I think it is the "Preferences > Mail preferences > General" tab that takes a LOT of space. I understand how complex evolution needs to be, but I think one of the solutions would be taking a hard look at the monstruous amount of preferences being crammed in the UI. If you are interested, I would be willing to walk around the UI and comment. For examples: - Why is there a font display configuration thing in the general preferences? Does anyone even use this?! This should be left up to Gnome to decide with its generic font/appearance preferences, I think. - Why is the "Email preferences" subdialog so cluttered? There is an "Autocompletion" subdialog that is practically empty, and on the other hand you have this behemoth of a dialog full of stuff that could potentially be rearranged? P.s.: the Evolution terms used here might not be the exact ones as my locale is not English, I am just guessing them.
jeff: constructive criticism welcome, any proposal what to put into which tab? the developers *are* aware of this problem (too much stuff in email preferences and so on), but as long as nobody comes up with a convincing system...
Hi, sorry of not replying sooner, I was reflecting upon this a little and I took a look at other «feature-rich» applications such as OpenOffice.org writer, the GIMP and VLC media player. Then it hit me. The way big apps manage to cram an insane amount of preferences in there: using nested treeviews! Here is the best example I have: the infamous kcontrol screenshot http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/_media/applications/skype-kcontrol.png?w=&h=&cache=cache Now, I'm not sure if this is the gnomeish way of doing it, but it sure seems like the best solution to handle large amounts of preferences. If GIMP does it (and its preferences dialog is pretty sane), I guess evolution could follow the model. VLC is NOT an example of good preference dialog design, openoffice is fair, but the GIMP's pretty good. Now before evaluating the gui further, I'd like to ask you folks if that has been considered, and if you would like to use that treeview technique. What it would allow us to do would be split some way-too-crowded tabs into multiple rows inside categories of a treeview. (I mean, categories *inside* tabs could become subcategories by themselves) It could also allow cleaning some cruft.
uh... Hello? do you or do you not like the idea of a treeview (and at the same time killing off those tabs, at least most of them)?
Created attachment 96564 [details] [review] Proposed Patch for dealing with the mail-configuration-dialog-hight I've been playing around with the mail/mail-config.glade file in evolution 2.12, because the preferences dialog was too tall for my 1024x768 14" laptop screen. If you single out the mail-notification stuff to a single notebook-tab and make the notebook-tabs scrollable, the hight seems to be ok now. Simply replacing the file on a precompiled evolution works, because I did not introduce new strings, even with translations. Take a look at the attached patch and tell me if something like this is an acceptable option.
Gert, we are removing the mail-notification from main preferences and moving it part of the plugin configuration. It should clean up. I dont think we want a separate tab for this. Btw, second hunk failed while I applied the patch on trunk. Can you put a screenshot atleast to show how it looks?
I agree that the dialog needs a clean-up, like most of the .glade files in evo (e.g. due to bugs similar to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426345 they are causing glade-3 to crash, so you'll need glade-2 to edit them). The patch-failure on trunk seems to be related with string-changes (Bug fix for Bug #480621) introduced after 2.12.0 release (on which I based the patch). https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/20776/comments/12 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/20776/comments/13 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/20776/comments/14 are including links to the requested screenshots.
Created attachment 96620 [details] [review] updated patch to apply cleanly on trunk
Gert, I definitely like the tab scrolling. Im fine to take it, unless it is a HIG violation. But the new mail notification thing will be out of that place in another few days. If you can give me a patch for the rest, I can review/test it.
What do you mean by "the rest"? If you remove the new mail notification-thing, the only change would be hunk #1 of the patch, that is: @@ -4559,7 +4559,7 @@ <property name="show_tabs">True</property> <property name="show_border">True</property> <property name="tab_pos">GTK_POS_TOP</property> - <property name="scrollable">False</property> + <property name="scrollable">True</property> <property name="enable_popup">False</property> <child> Do you want me to pack this in a seperate patch?
Gert, oh ok. You can just put the patch for scrollable tabs. I would prefer to take that for trunk. Johnny, when is the preferences changes for new mail hitting trunk?
Created attachment 96678 [details] [review] Enable the use of scrollable tabs in mail-preferences dialog This enables the use of scrollable tabs in the mail-preferences dialog, which causes the preferences dialog not to allocate more horizontal space then the widest dialog (mail-preferences, tab "general") needs. Especially for localized versions of evolution an enhancement when using 1024x768 resolution.
commit to head.
Committed to SVN trunk as r34807 (http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/evolution?view=revision&revision=34807)
I see the patch is committed, but the bug is not closed. I'm closing it, but feel free to reopen, if needed.