UI Improvements in Evolution 2.8

Four months, in GNOME 2.16 cycle, We have added a lot of UI improvements to Evolution to make it look much better. Not just features and lot of bug fixes too!!! I have blogged them in parts. Im summarising all of them.

Cairo Rendering for Calendar

Evolution Calendar takes direct advantage of Cairo. It enabled us to make calendar much appealing. Now calendar features the following features

– The entire calendar, day/month view is drawn using Cairo.
– The selected event is shown with a shadow.

– When u re-size the event, you can see the end time shown in
the bottom of the event.
– The tag calendar has been moved to the left. Users can select the day on the left and see the events on the right

– There is a top header in every event that displays the start
time of the event.

Vertical View in Mailer

– Dynamic switch to Vertical view for Wide screen monitors
– Composite columns, which merges few of the most used columns
in to a 2 line column, so that the user has a extra width to
have a reasonable width for the preview. Automatic switching to
this view on vertical view mode.
– Right click to sort on hidden columns.
– Ability to custom short the number of emails displayed in
headers in the message preview/view with a option to expand.

Search

– Quick Search bar: It features some of the most used
predefined instant apply criteria on the mail list.

– One interface to search for all mails in current
folder/account/all accounts and current mail.
– For current message, it uses no pop up dialog for search
widgets.
– Implements All account search. Don’t have to hack around with VFolders to search :).

There were a lot of UI bug fixes. You wont see the shading over NEW button any more and It follows the gconf setting for toolbar buttons. The comma deletion in NameSelector is no more over smart and just works as expected and a lot more fixes.

Future

A lot of other works have started like

– Split UI
Load the bonobo component of just one module, when started
with a command line option or so. It reduces the preferences
options, menu size and to some extent memory. (Ex. You open
calendar and mail. Just See your calendar and close it, it is
off your memory) It has few missing bits like plugin support
and other logistics. It should be ready for the next
release (Hope so :). This model allows Evolution to run as a Suite as
well as in split mode. I have demoed this during my GUADEC talk.
– Toolbar/Shortcut Editor (Pretty lame implementation, due to the
limitation of libbonoboui)

– HTML Composer for Calendar/Tasks/Memo

58 thoughts on “UI Improvements in Evolution 2.8”

  2. Cairo stuff looks cool 🙂

    One small doubt: isn’t the appointment cell lacking a little bit of padding? I think it would be easier on the eyes, more relaxed…

    Good job!

  3. i can just say: let’s get rid of bonobo. the faster, the better. you know of the bugs that are currently blocked by our bonobo dependency.

  4. Are there plans to finish making all of the evolution icons tango-compatible?

  7. As noted padding of the calendar items seems a bit odd and the style could be a little bit less fancy. A much simpler style should be preferred aswell.

    Asides, I would say that there are useability issues in Evolution that should get a higher priority to be fixed than adding graphical updates.

    A simple example of one of them is the inability to move calendar items in all calendar views. (Especially in the month view)

    Anyways, keep up the great work!

  8. Looks nice – not sure the drop shadow makes sense.

    Also, if the appointments are supposed to be semitransparent, something with that opacity wouldn’t project a shadow that dark. I think that’s why it looks a bit wrong.

  9. Rafael Jannone: I didnt understand your point on the padding. Can you explain me a bit?

  10. Looks really nice, but why not focus on adding support for changing server port numbers, so that users that works at companies that don’t use standard port numbers can actually use the client?

    I cannot use this client even when you have implemented Cairo rendering…

  12. This looks awesome but please keep the overall performance in mind. Gnome and Evolution matured so much over the last releases that I have no further wishes than performance improvements.

  13. Nice, but will the messages list (and tree when using threaded view) be standard GTK+ one? Current one renders slower (or it seems so to me) and has problems with theming.

    Note that this was already done at the folders tree: older Evo versions used custom widget whereas newer ones do use standard GTK+ tree.

  14. Last month when I used Outlook for the first time, I was really sad Evo didn’t have the vertical view. Now it does 😉

    Great work indeed!

  15. From the screenshots, it looks like you can now drag-and-drop between the calendar and the mint tasklist (probably to set one of the date fields like start/finish time)… is this correct? If so, that would something I have longed for quite some time!

  16. On the Evolution mail toolbar:

    Send/Recieve button should go away and this operation should be automatic.

    Junk/Not Junk should be the same button instead of having on be greyed out all the time.

    Cancel doesn’t make sense. What operation would you cancel if Send/Recieve were automatic?

  18. C.J.: It’s already in Ubuntu. Unless you are asking when it will be in a stable ubuntu release, in which case the answer is “at the next stable ubuntu release”, obviously (which comes out October 26th)

  19. About the send/receive thing : I only hope the progress dialog will be gone soon.

    Maybe take a look at what the Pan news reader does on time consuming operations…

  20. Those UI-improvements look pretty cool!
    But I think Evolution is a usability catastrophe and therefore I don’t care too much about the cool looking artwork. I’d rather like to see some improvements that make Evolution at least usable for me. For example:
    – I can use Space to page through a message. Fine. But to get to the next unread message I have to use a different key. Why?
    – I have about 20 mail folders where new messages are inserted into on the server by sieve. There is no way to go to the next folder containing new messages short of using the mouse or or an ugly combination of F6 and Up, Down. Unusable.
    – One can’t associate an email account with a mail folder. Very, very useful if you’re subscribed to different mailing lists with different mail adresses. Evolution doesn’t help me in selecting the right account / the right headers.
    Those (and some more) are the reasons why Evolution went into my trash bin and I’m still using KMail (on Gnome).

  21. Hi All,
    The GUI is perfect.
    But, the best improvement gonna be the access to M$ Outlook Server in more then one account at the same time.
    Cause, where I work, we use a particular and a workgroup inbox. And, when needed, we access a .pst file to store a history of emails.
    Please, work on it!
    [ ]s
    Alexandre Figueiredo
    From Brazil

  22. Looking very good. How does it look and behave on KDE desktops? Currently I have quite a few issues with trying to configure things like helper apps as I don’t use Gnome, and it’d be really, really nice if you guys can make Evolution less Gnome-specific.

    Vik :v)

  23. I’m wondering if you guys are planning to add a synchronization feature that syncs the current status of my evolution with a pop3 server. Right now I can choose to leave every message on the server (even if I delete it on my local machine) or download and remove to my computer. There’s no way (as there is in thunderbird) to leave on server and synchronize deletes. This is the only thing preventing me from switching from t-bird -> evolution.

  24. Evolution is in my opinion the single must important app for the adoption of Linux in the enterprise. and its single must important feature is compatibility with Exchange.
    Good work, but please, with every realease, make it closer to be a first class exchange client.

  25. Thanks a lot for your comments. We are working hard to fix all the problems.

    Rafael Jannone: I got your point. One missing bit, in th
    entire thing is the CAIRO Font rendering for EText(Antialiased text), which is not yet over. Once it is done, it will be taken care automatically.

  26. The calendar looks nice, but there are still several unresolved issues with evolution.
    1. Calendar mode: Why is there a Send/Recv. button on the toolbar when evolution is in calendar mode? I know that evolution is also an email client, but there is no reason why it should be visible in calendar mode.
    2. Adding entries to the calendar is not simple enough. Google calendar is a perfect example of how I think it could be done. When I click on the button to add an appointment in Evolution, a farly large dialog box pops up where I have to/can fill in all sorts of information, when usually I just want to enter a single sentence.
    3. Send/recv opens a new dialog box, and block the main window while downloading email. Would it be possible to just add a small icon on a statusbar that indicates that evolution is downloading mail?

  27. This look very nice !

    On the Ui Side, why does the current folder not expand when right keying ?

    On the feature side, are there plans to be able to “tag” messages ? (Like the extension “Tag the bird” of Thunderbird)

  29. I’d like to know if it will be implemented something like the feature present in T-bird, which allows to check mail for selected accounts, instead of a global receive/send mail which involves all the accounts.

    Thanks for your attention, Evolution is actually my unique mailer program, and I’d like it being perfect, as much as possible :-)))

  31. The new quick search is actually an usability regression : instead of using max horizontal space like the old search field it limits itself to a small width which means you can’t search easily anything longuer than a word

  32. Very nice indeed! However, I’d really love to see the ‘ignore thread’ functionality. And the ‘mark thread as read’ should mark entire thread, not just descendants of currently selected mail.

  33. Concerning your Split UI plans:

    I did not get to see your talk, so you may have covered this quirk, but one of my biggest complaints about the email component (at least the way I understand it — may be completely wrong), is that mail fetching, filtering, etc., can not be running separately in the background, whether I have the UI to read/send mail up or not.

  34. I love Evolution and these changes look very solid. It’s getting a lot more consistent thoughout!

    One thing I really would like to see improvement on is the composer itself. I don’t know why it still uses GtkHTML but the composer in Thunderbird is so much better! In particular, my emeils look different while I’m typing them than they do when I view them in my sent folder. Also, html mail that I recieve looks pretty bad and there is no support for stylesheets.

    Are there plans underway to ditch GtkHTML or improve it so it supports more of these standard features?

  35. Will IMAP be fixed this release? The horrible IMAP performance regression last patch made it the slowest IMAP client I’ve ever had the misfortune to try to use. So slow its simply unusable compared to every other IMAP client I’ve tried on the system system.

  36. I use Evolution at work and one of the problems with Evolutions presentation of HTML mails is that it uses the base[NORMAL] and text[NORMAL]? I think? – to render HTML mails. This is fine for most themes as the colors tend to be close to white. Except the good themes tend to be closer to black 🙂

    This has the effect of rendering many of the normal colors – e.g. Outlooks reply in blue as near invisible.

    What is needed is a way of selecting default background and foreground colours within Evolution for both display of new and received messages.

    Currently I have to download all messages via Exchange/Evolution to a local Maildir and use another program to view and create messages. 2 programs to do one job 🙁

  37. Okay, the appointment graphics are cool. But some of the toolbar icons really suck badly, e.g. the Today icon: can you say “ugly”? Tango is not there yet. We are nowhere compared to Apple’s graphics. Why is the dropdown arrow next to the New button so huge? This goes back to the old Evolution days. Heh, seems Evolution doesn’t evolve that much after all. We are still mimicking Outlook instead of innovating. And what’s this “Send / Receive” thing? Why use mathematical symbols if you can say “Send and Receive”. We are already wasting space in the toolbar anyway so why not make things clear and consistent … Wake up guys.

  38. The UI-improvement I’m still waiting for is a solution to get the addressbook converted in .csv via the menu.
    The commandline-tool is horrible to use and produces nothing but garbage.

  40. Very pretty. I do hope the Exchange compatibility is given the importance it deserves. Right now we need more stable Exchange support in order for Evolution to be a realistic alternative.

  41. I’d echo the comments on Exchange compatibility. I’ve tried making the current release on Ubuntu to talk to Exchange with no success.

    I’m now using Thunderbird with Exchange IMAP support at the moment, and Outlook Web Access for other features. It’s a huge step backwards from my Windows desktop and it’s the only significant feature preventing adoption. Document handling in OpenOffice is excellent; printer support has been seamless; Skype and Instant Messaging just work. Add reliable (even if not fully featured) Exchange compatibility and I can delete my Windows partition.

  42. Tango icons please! For now I use Thunderbird with skin. Drop by at #tango on irc.freenode.net 🙂

  46. I would like to see something like the Outlook 2007 ToDo Bar on the main screen with email preview. That way you can see a thumbnail view of upcoming to do items or appointments/reminders without having to go to the calendar screen first.

  47. If you want something good to compare and copy look at Mail of Mac, they have the leading GUI and usability

  48. It’s all very well making it pretty, but the exchange plugin needs some serious work. It’s just about useable and only crashes once in a while.

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