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Thunderbird 115

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Re: Thunderbird 115

#301

Post by johnchristopher »

johnchristopher wrote: post #63

At last !: > Card View emulates a mobile interface list with multi-line support, offering a more comfortable appearance to reduce cognitive burden. Took them long enough. And they said it couldn't be done, sheesh. Outlook 2003 had that for... 20 years.

Thanks for the downvotes Thunderbird white knights but I have the bug reports to back up my saltiness:

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335310 Closed Bug 335310 Opened 18 years ago Closed 16 years ago Suggest Multi-line Message List display (great in vertical view)

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 Bug 213945 Opened 20 years ago Closed 4 months ago Mail/message listing/thread pane needs more organization in 3 vertical pane view (column wrapping, etc) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=307013

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307070 Open Bug 307070 Opened 18 years ago Updated 1 month ago Request for Outlook-style AutoPreview feature to see first few lines of messages

As the guy who made a close to pixel perfect office2003 theme for Tbird back in the 00's this feature has sentimental value to me and am very happy this has finally landed.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#302

Post by JohnFen »

smarkov wrote: post #186
donatj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to quickly scan a large list of emails without scrolling is practical and useful. All whitespace achieves is aesthetics, which are meaningless beyond initial adoption. My work email rarely exist in a vacuum, they exist in the context of all my other work emails. The ability to actually cross reference and get work done quickly should always trump aesthetics. These modern “spaced out” UIs are infuriating, t…

> Being able to quickly scan a large list of emails without scrolling is practical and useful. Conversely, why is scrolling considered evil? We can agree that emails are documents. In real life, on your desk, do spread out all your documents so you could see them all at once? Or do you have a stack of them and view them one by one? You can still cross reference by putting documents side by side, just like you can wit…

> I don't think whitespace is all about aesthetics. Personally, it makes it easier for me to read and focus on things.

And for me, having too low of information density makes it harder to use the software.

The obvious answer is to allow both sorts of UI aesthetics.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#303

Post by ryanleesipes »

nik736 wrote: post #16

What happened to the look that was announced? [0] The announcement was way more modern than the screenshot that is shown now. [0]: https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap

Product Manager here. The answer is because we are tied to the ESR release cycle we have to release at a certain time (we are working on changing this). So we're shipping all the work that is done and stable. There is still work to be done to the front-end and as much as people want to trivialize it, it's not so simple. To make the changes we did, we had to rewrite a very complicated front-end with some code that has been there for 20 years and had entire systems built upon it. We are going to get to what the mockup showed. But we're going to build it right, and that means rewriting large pieces of our codebase. We'll ship the remaining stuff when they are ready.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#304

Post by johnchristopher »

Keegs wrote: post #246
andix wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information density can be very overwhelming and a factor for stress. Often a lower density is totally enough and less stressful to use. Providing an optional "compact mode" for people with smaller screens or who prefer denser layouts would be my way to go.

I’m interested to know where this idea comes from. Is there a good reference you recommend? My anecdotal experience has been that low density websites like Medium are more stressful than higher density websites like Substack/HN because I have to do more work to read the text on the page.

That's not really comparable though. Medium and substack have one main item: the text (and its headings) while a mail application has the mail content, the subject, replies, timestamps, etc. and you can see a long list of email in a pane plus a list of folders, then you have the actionable items (reply, send, find, etc.). There are more information and actionable items on the list that in an article read in a browser.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#305

Post by jzb »

jonhohle wrote: post #282
jzb wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That threw me for a loop. I went to download 115 and got 102. I've mostly stuck with webmail (Fastmail for personal, Gmail for work) but would love to get back to a local client. So I'm willing to give the new Thunderbird a shot, but it's perplexing when they advertise 115 and give me 102 and it's really unclear how to get the nifty stuff they're advertising.

Gmail supports IMAP. Even in a corporate environment I used Mail as my client.

Yes, I'm aware. But I don't have any interest in mingling my work + personal / project email.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#306

Post by nerdponx »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #188
nerdponx wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the second one lacks polish in terms of the styling of the UI components. The mockup was really pretty and its use of color and borders/outlines, while the current version seems to have heavier outlines, leading to an overall clunkier appearance. I'll run this by a couple of my UX friends to see if they can express what I'm talking about in more professional terms so I can provide coherent feedback to the Thu…

But the things you mention are specifically the things that I think works better in the second one. I can maybe agree that the first one looks more "polished" but at the same time I actually feel a but uneasy looking at it because my brain has to work harder to discern the UI elements due to the lack of colors and low contrast. Although the lines are heavier in the second one, I find it much easier to filter out the…

Fair enough, I suspect that there's no correct answer here short of doing extensive user studies and/or adding a lot of custom theme or UI configuration settings that the team certainly does not have time to work on. still, the UX/UI professionals are professionals for a reason, and it can't hurt to get their opinion specifically.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#307

Post by jeroenhd »

velosol wrote: post #185
andix wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the UI platform you're using supports themes, this can usually be fixed with that. Provide one default theme that looks perfectly polished, and another more compact one for power users.

Which do you default to for someone coming from years of Thunderbird usage? How in-your-face is compact mode toggle in the ootb experience for a fresh install? And sadly how many people are going to be new to Thunderbird these days? If I got the 'polished' version as part of the normal update cycle I'd be upset that my tight, space-efficient and incredibly responsive productivity app had decided to use a design langu…

I'm seeing a density picker right on the announcement page. I don't think you need to use the calm, whitespaced version of the theme if you don't want to.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#308

Post by nerdponx »

pmontra wrote: post #177
nerdponx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's better about POP3 for you?

I download from Thunderbird and the messages are gone from the server of the provider. Of course I keep them there when I download in K9.

That's a disadvantage to me, because I pay my email provider in part for the reliability of not losing my emails, and also because I tend to access my email from several different devices and I want to make sure everything is synchronized. What's the advantage of downloading them all locally?

Re: Thunderbird 115

#309

Post by tredre3 »

amelius wrote: post #292

How does search work if my mails are stored remotely, on a server?

Thunderbird can be configured to download all emails in full and index them (I don't think it does that by default).

But mail clients usually use the IMAP search command and the server does the searching:

    Client: A282 SEARCH FLAGGED SINCE 1-Feb-1994 NOT FROM "Smith"
    Server: * SEARCH 2 84 882
    Server: A282 OK SEARCH completed
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1730#section-6.4.4

Re: Thunderbird 115

#310

Post by sangriafria »

andix wrote: post #260
precompute wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Information density can be very overwhelming and a factor for stress. Really? And what about tiny scrollbars?

Since we have mouse wheels and touch screens scroll bars transformed mostly away from interactive UI components to scroll position indicators. Good components dynamically get bigger when you hover over them with your mouse or long press they on a touch screen.

Scroll indicators are fine if they stay visible. The default on mobiles and macOS is that the scroll indicator disappears once you stop scrolling. There was a webpage where I couldn't tell that an area was scrollable until I found out by accident, at which point I enabled the scrollbars to always show on macOS as I didn't want to get tripped up by that again
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