Great insight into a UI so good nobody will ever notice it (not being sarcastic there). Reminds me of your awesome post on the tab resizing UI for Google Chrome. Well done!
How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#22We do the same thing for the Notifo iPhone app, except our "magic number" is 1. If you are the top of the list, new notifications slide in and push the list down. If you are scrolled down past the first notification, new notifications load in, but the list stays still (a non-trivial thing to do with UITableViews). I never knew the mail app did the same thing (I have mine set to refresh manually); it just seemed like…
Twitter’s Mac app does this, too, it also only scrolls if you are not farther down than one tweet. (Automatic scrolling, which is off by default, has to be enabled.)
Most (probably all) chat clients (IM and IRC) do this too. I think it is more common than the author gives credit for. It's invisible unless it's missing.
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#23We do the same thing for the Notifo iPhone app, except our "magic number" is 1. If you are the top of the list, new notifications slide in and push the list down. If you are scrolled down past the first notification, new notifications load in, but the list stays still (a non-trivial thing to do with UITableViews). I never knew the mail app did the same thing (I have mine set to refresh manually); it just seemed like…
Twitter’s Mac app does this, too, it also only scrolls if you are not farther down than one tweet. (Automatic scrolling, which is off by default, has to be enabled.)
Friendfeed implements this, on the website, and I really wish quora would also. I'm always in the middle of reading something on quora when the content moves around. It's particularly jarring on mobile devices, I lose my place a lot.
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#24I don't have an iPhone, but I do have a question...
What if you've sorted the list (by sender, for example) so the 'natural' place for the new message is half way down your list? Will it determine a travel delta or something similar to determine whether to snap you to the message?
I'm guessing you can't sort your email.
I've run into this problem before (how to orient a view of a list that is updated in the background). Google, for example, partitions the list into 'all items' and 'new items' so if you've paged half way through the list, the incoming item is added to the 'new items' view and a visual indicator is made that a new item exists (cf. Google Reader).
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#25I don't have an iPhone, but I do have a question... What if you've sorted the list (by sender, for example) so the 'natural' place for the new message is half way down your list? Will it determine a travel delta or something similar to determine whether to snap you to the message? I'm guessing you can't sort your email. I've run into this problem before (how to orient a view of a list that is updated in the backgroun…
> I'm guessing you can't sort your email.
Correct.
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#26I don't have an iPhone, but I do have a question... What if you've sorted the list (by sender, for example) so the 'natural' place for the new message is half way down your list? Will it determine a travel delta or something similar to determine whether to snap you to the message? I'm guessing you can't sort your email. I've run into this problem before (how to orient a view of a list that is updated in the backgroun…
Your post reminds me of a discovery I made a few weeks ago that BLEW MY MIND:
You can not sort messages in Gmail.
I'm betting that reading that statement just caused a bunch of people to say "Really?" and go check, but it's for real. In several years of using Gmail, I never felt the need. Search always found what I wanted. I mentioned this to some people in my office and they were similarly stunned that they never noticed.
One curmudgeonly former Outlook jockey said that he's missed that feature forever. shrug. When I used to use Outlook on an Exchange server, search frequently didn't find messages that I already had open! They were just missing from the index, word stemming didn't work, or one of many other problems. Also, I used to hit my storage quota and have to sort by size to delete offending large attachments. Never have any of those problems with Gmail, so why would I need sort?
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#27I really wish Gwibber would learn that lesson.
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#28hmm, this is why I never scroll in big lists: just search.
the phone only caches about 100 emails per inbox anyway, so odds on the email just isn't there by scrolling. searching will go and fetch older ones from the server too, and the results sit there (new emails or no) until you're done with them.
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#29Swell. Doesn't stop me from flying into a rage when it decides it's time to delete (not archive, mind you, delete) everything from my inbox without warning despite the 6+ gigs i have free on the device. Thanks Mail App. Go f*ck yourself.
Sounds more like another POP3 mail application downloading and deleting your messages, AFAIK Mail.app never deletes messages in any Inbox regardless of available space. So either that, or you've hit a very rare bug since deleting peoples inboxes would be headline news on par with the Android SMS bug.
Re: How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter’s Mac app does this, too, it also only scrolls if you are not farther down than one tweet. (Automatic scrolling, which is off by default, has to be enabled.)
Most (probably all) chat clients (IM and IRC) do this too. I think it is more common than the author gives credit for. It's invisible unless it's missing.
I think the best UIs are generally full of the "invisible unless it's missing stuff".
Thats the subtle stuff that is often hard to get right.