Hi Tiago,
2012.03.19 17:47, Tiago Cardoso Goncalves - DATAPREVDF rašė:
Researched plugins on the use of tabs in roundcube but found no ticket on the subject.
Then I would like to know what you think about this job with tabs in webmail and if there is some work already begun on the development of a plugin?
We are researching whether it is worth developing a plugin for our webmail service.
Attached two screenshots related to this.
a couple of thoughts for you to consider:
- Roundcube is already capable of showing both the folder list and a
message at the same time. I haven't seen the Larry skin, which is under development, but the current default skin has a possibility to enable message preview pane, which, I think, is rarely not enough. I imagine a custom skin (or perhaps even Larry) could be even more flexible, e.g., by allowing the user to choose between no preview pane/pane on the bottom/pane on the right. The only thing the preview pane doesn't do is display multiple messages at once, which it looks like your system is capable of.
- I'm not sure it's worth duplicating what the browser already does.
Every modern browser already has tabs and to quote IE blog [1], "over 97% of IE sessions have 5 or fewer tabs, and more than 90% of users have never had more than 8 tabs open simultaneously". Now, IE is not the only browser in the world, but I think other browsers would spot similar numbers. Having that in mind, I think (a few additional) browser tabs would be a good alternative for these cases, when a user needs to have more than one message open at the same time. And I just checked – with preview pane off, middle-clicking a message title does exactly what I would expect it to – opens the message in a new browser tab (with the pane on, it opens the message both in the pane and in the new tab).
You may want to run a survey or use other means to figure out how many tabs the users usually have in your webmail app. If opening a new message in a tab is currently the only option, at least to me that would be more an annoyance than a feature. :) Perhaps this feeling is shared between your users aswell?
Regards, Rimas
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/09/20/user-experiences-sites-in-the-...