Anjal – Moblin updates

Moblin 2.0 is announced, and I can be more open ๐Ÿ™‚ now. Before I start with anything, one thing that I missed last time. The ‘new-ness’, ‘awesome-ness’ of Anjal’s UI, *FULL* credits of the UI design goes to the Intel UI Team, specially thanks Nick Richards, Hylke Bons, and Clarie Alexander. I really donno how many hours, itsย  Nick who discussed each and every page of it in detail in chat, and helped me create the UI from mock. Btw, don’t ask and compare his wireframe with the UI ๐Ÿ˜‰ , it deviates a bit, due to feasibility, etc.

Now back to Anjal… screenshots…. descriptions. Here goes the main screen.

The main focus points on the main screen:-

  • Tabs – Every single thing is a tab.
    • Your mail, folder, settings, account details, etc.
    • Every thing is a unique tab. Meaning double click opened mail, you would be directed to the already opened tab.
    • Are you a keyboard power user? If so, you can live inside singe tab. Keyboard controls (ENTER) opens the message in the same tab of the folder and BACKSPACE takes you back to the folder view. You don’t have to worry with mouse.
  • Threads – I would call it smart threads, similar to gmailish.
    • Threads group them selves, and moves up the sort, as and when you get new mails to it.
    • The count says, how many messages you have in it. May be later, I would add how many new in it as well.
    • The live-preview, gets you approx ~200 chars from the latest message of the thread. Its picks unquoted text, leaves out headers etc and gets you the possible best of the message.
    • On the left, mark entire thread as read and on the right, mark all as junk/spam.
  • People – Its not yet implemented. Ideally it would add a tab of addressbook.

  • Thread Display – Everything inside a thread.
    • This is the message view, with in the same tab. Other would look no different, when in a new tab.
    • It just lists down the messages with in the thread.
    • Auto scrolls down, to the first unread message, and auto expands it.
    • Marks messages as read, as you scroll down the messages in the thread.
    • ‘show details’ – hides most of the headers. Click that or Shift Left/right shows that.

Oh, you need to reply?

Click that ‘Reply to Andre Klapper’ button, opens you a inline composer, scrolled down well. Write up can and press Send. and continue reading rest of the thread. Next composing a new mail ?

‘To:’ – Auto completes from EDS. We just don’t have an addressbook UI.

Need to search for an email ?

Type and Enter to search. Instant apply message list. No regen etc. Thread in message list adpot to search automagically. Preview in message list too adpots to search. Fixed sorting options now,ย  instant apply when selected.

First time creating?

You will get a 1024×568 min welcome screen. It is intelligent than it appears.

  • Auto fills Full Name from user account
  • You just fill-in email-address. If its a popular service, it does the rest.
    • ‘rupert@gmail.com’ then it fills in the IMAP/SMTP configuration automatically.
    • Now just have GMAIL, Yahoo, MSN, AOL. In future, we would support more. I would like to do even region wise support.

Check up everything on the review page.

The setting page, now only provides an option to edit account. More preferences should be done down the lane. Its pretty usable now, though there are some random crashers and issue.

Anjal has a bugzilla in GNOME and should be easy to try out and report a bug.

Source code is maintained at http://git.gnome.org/cgit/anjal and Anjal need patchedย  Evolution/EDS and Webkit. Patches available as part of the source code itself for various versions.

GNOME 2.27.x would have the Evo/EDS patches merged in a week or so and I *must* soon push the webkit patches, been busy and didn’t have much time.

Want to try out? Bharath is actively maintianing OpenSUSE build service daily snapshots – http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME://Evolution://snapshots/ Try out Anjal on OpenSUSE 11.1 / Factory.

If you catch Bharath(abharath) on irc (GimpNet-#evolution/FreeNode-#opensuse-gnome), make him to build for GNOME 2.26. Easy buy him time or Chicken. Anything would do ๐Ÿ™‚

Or easier, find out how to try Moblin2 on OpenSUSE and seeย  http://en.opensuse.org/Moblin for screenshots etc . We have a *scary* (It will wipe off your disk and Install OpenSUSE/Moblin) iso as well as installable rpms.

Even easier, install from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Moblin://UI/openSUSE_11.1 or http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Moblin://UI/openSUSE_Factory build service repositories. [I hope the build would complete before you try. If not, be patient for a few hours]

Ok, all those apart, its still not yet 0.1, which is gonna be very soon. It works well, reliable, but there some crashes, minor issue, ui glitches yet to be carved to perfection ๐Ÿ™‚ which is on the way very soon.

On the whole, checkout everything, join us. Moblin rocks!!!

19 thoughts on “Anjal – Moblin updates”

  1. Damn. That GUI is just amazing.. while reading through the article i hoped it would say the screenshots are actually from a desktop version ๐Ÿ˜‰ If Gnome 3 has the same look and feel, we’re in for a treat ๐Ÿ™‚ Must.. resist.. buying… netbook…

    Keep up the great work!

    Bart Verwilst

  2. This is so great.

    Combined with all the other Moblin stuff: just awesome.

    Anjal is definitely a client I would also use on the big screen.

    Maybe the whole Moblin UI though, depending on what GNOME 3.0 brings.

    This could get pretty close ๐Ÿ™‚

  3. Awesome screen shots! Great work srini ๐Ÿ™‚ I appreciate the smart UI design from the Intel team. Thanks to them as well! Getting the things from paper to reality is such a great thing ๐Ÿ™‚

  4. Congrats for the great work! It looks awesome! (I’m trying to compile it, but I fail… ๐Ÿ™ )

    Was wondering about the green dot on the right of the messages: at first I thought it was a “presence” indicator, like that particular person that wrote that email is now on-line based on my contacts and telepathy-stuff. Are there any plans on adding a feature like that? Could be interesting… (at least for me ๐Ÿ™‚ )

    Ciao.

  5. Nice..

    BTW is it possible to disable the “multi-line live-preview”… on small screens, it would severely restrict the number of messages one can see without scrolling. Or make it share the subject line.

    Also in the message list, as the sender’s name is in a separate line, you could display the names of all the senders in that thread and also the receivers names in a dim-preview kind of font.

    May be I am asking for too much. ๐Ÿ™‚

  6. Bart, btw, the screenshots are from a normal GNOME 2.26.x desktop ๐Ÿ™‚

    Milo: Its on the plate to do, may be later.

    Heinzi: I took Murrine Gillouche and somes custom changes on it.

    Jamie: It should be compilable and usable on Maemo.

    Nikanth: I can make that configurable. That all other senders would be a bad idea IMO.

  7. I hate to say it but I think there are some huge bits of crack in this design :/

    I do want to be constructive about them though… So I’m gonna make a list of the issues I see here;

    1, In the first diagram the buttons for delete/junk have not been thought out correctly. The junk icon for an item is too close to the delete icon of the following icon. This will be prone to catastrophic miss-presses on touch interfaces, which I assume this will be used on?

    2, The rules hinting + grey text is fail. People with bad eye sight will never be able to read this.

    3, By saying everything is a tab is a bit crazy, this is for multiple reasons, firstly, I don’t care too much to have multiple folders open in multiple tabs, it appears I can’t hide the tab bar so it’s always going to take up a portion of my vertical screen space forever. And considering that a folders list is intended to switch the context of a pane to the right of it in *most* ui’s, opening folders in tabs by default would make me cry.

    4, Why is the tab which is showing a threaded message view called inbox? why doesn’t it use the subject of the thread? This is simply confusing.

    5, It appears that the message view is designed to be used only by people who don’t top post? Which is … mostly geeks? I don’t know many non-geek people that care about top posting etc… If you have user testing data to the contrary please furnish me with the proof.

    So the problem here is as follows, if I’ve got a really really long email, which I read, then see the reply button then great, generally people will write at the top of the email, because that way it gets noticed. In order to write my reply I then scroll right to the top of *that* email, but that email’s top isn’t necessarily at the top of the list… So I can’t just pull to the top, I’ve got to meander to the right point, I write my reply, send… Well I’ll probably have to scroll all the way down back to the bottom of the message to send. So I’ve done two scrolls on replying to an email, both of which end somewhere within the scroll space and not necessarily at the top or the bottom.

    The recipient receives that email in the same client, reads the top of the message and says… “How do I reply??!?!?!” Panic ensues, IT department then choose to ditch the email client under user pressure, or user ditches email client because they just can’t fathom it… Whichever market you point at, the reply button’s position has failed to inspire the user.

    6. It appears to be designed for people that care about threads? Not everyone uses threads, people tend to organise things in their head more often by date, time, person and subject than an actual rigid thread. Threads get messy for people that don’t understand them, and/or people who receive emails from people that don’t understand threads, I’ve often received emails as replies where the sender has just changed the subject. The design of the threaded view causes problem 5, and although it’s obviously one of the main focal points of the design it will be prone to failure in user testing IMHO. If you have user testing data I’d love to see results?

    7. There needs to be more space between the (X) and the configuration button, you don’t want to miss-click with a thumb press and close accidentally.

  8. I just had a really cool idea after looking at these screenshots.

    What if we added a small “Save” button to the search box? The user could search for some keywords or whatever and then hit the save button to save the search as an automatically updated ‘Filtered Folder’ in the sidebar.

    It would be like a quick and easy-to-make “Smart Playlist” in iTunes, but for messages instead of music. Using these, users could easily make smart filtered folders, and they can save what they were looking for, for later use.

  9. This is a good job!
    I viewed codes and realized that clutter has been used.
    And i wonder that whether you want to use clutter to write the whole UI ?
    If so,please tell me,that would be more exciting.

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