On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 5:28 AM, Benjamin Connelly ben@electricembers.net wrote:
I hear 0.8 is almost ready to be released. Exciting (and anxiety producing ;)
Thanks! Also it's never too late to offer feedback. The upcoming release isn't the end of the world but we have to draw the line somehwere.
I really love the new artwork/icons, but below is a list of things I'd love to see improved with the skin before feeling comfortable rolling it out to our users. (I'm testing code grabbed daily using
git clone https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail.git
Is this the best way to test the latest changes?)
That actually is, yes.
- I have a 1024x768 display, and if I reset the zoom level (ctrl+0) in the
browser, then the mailbox view (with or without preview pane) does not fit on the screen. A horizontal scroll bar appears, but who want's to have to scroll right just to see the "Settings" and "Logout" buttons, half of "Address Book" button, columns right of Date etc.? It takes two zoom out's (ctrl+-) to get to a point where the horizontal scroll bar goes away, but at that point the text is uncomfortably small. At 1280 this is not a problem.
There was a recent request to explicitly add a minimum width which triggers a horizontal scrollbar. Of course that's not very nice but even worse is the situation where UI elements don't fit on the screen and overlap each others. 1024 has been a default for long time but nowadays screens become wider and therefore we increased the minimum size. Making everything fit into 1024 would probably affect the general arrangements of the UI elements and thus be a drawback for users with higher resolutions (which I believe is the majority).
- In "Settings" at this 1024 resolution, a lot of the various sections
create a horizontal scroll bar in the third (far right) pane. I think they layout of 3 columns is nifty, but also a lot of screen real estate gets wasted and all the content feels cramped to the right. Especially true with more complicated areas like the managesieve plugin's filter form. I actually prefer the old "tabs" for the first level of hierarchy in settings, then a two column view with plenty of room to work with the actual content in a wider right column.
See answer from 0)
- I really like that Larry shows who you're logged in as, but that top bar
with just "about" on the left and these items on the right also seems to consume a bit more real estate than it actually needs.
Ack.
- The next bar down is even thicker, and seems to create a big void of
unusable space top center, pushing everything down.
- With the status messages moved to the bottom of the screen means there is
yet another blank bar down there most of the time, instead of sometimes using the empty real estate top center as the old skin did.
- I actually prefer the way the old skin had a soft fading dividing line
between the "Mail, Address Book, Settings, Logout" buttons, instead of being hard all the way across. And the gradient of this new "Mail, Address Book, Settings" button bar seems messy between the gorgeous light and dark grey linen textures (especially the way the active button has it's gradient reversed.) Couldn't they all just be the ligher grey linen texture?
Lines, colors, gradients, fading, etc. all belong together to the overall appearance of the screen design. It was the designer's choice to draw them the way there are drawn and that of course is a up to personal taste. We'll not go into any color discussions here unless there are strong concerns from a usability perspective. No matter how we design the UI, there are always people who like it more and some don't like it. That's why Roundcube offers you the possibility to create your own skin.
- The folder actions icon seems inordinately large. Also in Settings ->
Folders and Identities, those similar icons (new identity, add a folder, folder actions) seem big to me. And in addressbook.
That again is a design element which I accept in the way our designer drew it.
- In composing messages, the body box seems cramped, and almost a little
hard to know it's there, or where it is. (Old skin had nice thin black lines and clean white. Now I find myself squinting to make out subtly greyer areas around the various rectangles.) Is it possible to not have the attachments column to the right, unless the user has actually clicked the button above to "Attach" a file? (it also adds a redundant redundant "Attach a file" button.)
- The new feature of having the addressbook contacts appear to the left
seems nifty. Is it possible to expand them by default? Without clicking "Personal addreses", folks might not know how useful this can be ;)
It would be possible, sure. The reason not to do so was the fact that there might be more than one address book and even the "personal address book" could be replaced by a corporate LDAP directory listing 50K contacts. In order to avoid unnecessary network activity and CPU power we wait for the user to say "I want to see this specific list of contacts here". Of course the just described situation doesn't apply for all installations for Roundcube and it would indeed make sense to expand the first address book by default.
- The various blues and greys and just aren't doing it for me. It feels
branded but not in our company's colors. Any hope for configurability, or something a little more neutral (whiter?) (Or perhaps we can just tweak the CSS to use different colors?)
This is again a color discussion which I'd like to avoid. However, there won't be any color configuration in the future. If you want to adjust colors, you simply create your own skin. That's why we created the skinning system in Roundcube.
- "threads" vs "list" buttons are not super obvious to me which is active,
and when clicked they seem to leave a dotted blue box around them going all the way to the left edge of the screen, until I click elsewhere?
I recently got similar feedback and we'll try to improve that.
- when viewing a message not just in the preview pane (but by double
clicking it) the "Back" button creates a strange vertical line to the left of it in the linen texture -- much like the "Reply All" and "Forward" buttons have to their right, but that's because they have drop down list options. This is a super duper minor critique.
I feel terrible laying all this on what has been a tremendous effort! I just wanted to share my honest opinion / impression.
Please don't feel terrible! We appreciate your feedback and improving the new UI is an ongoing process which won't end with the upcoming release.
Best regards, Thomas