Re: New Balsa Message 3.1

[Matthew Guenther <mguenthe engr uvic ca>]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Ian Campbell wrote:

> 
> I've had complaints that the 3rd patch didn't apply cleanly to CVS. 
> 
> The attached patch is identical to the previous one, but is made from CVS
> about 5 minutes ago (7:30pm UK time on monday).
> 

Well I tried it out at home, it looks like a good start, however there were
(for me at least) several problems:

1) I can get it to reliably segfault by attempting to view more than 100
messages in a session (i.e. open mailbox, select first message, press down
arrow ~100 times-> error)

2) When selecting a long message, the program freezes for a noticable amount
of time, and nothing get's redrawn.  This is annoying and looks bad (I would
like to be able to _quickly_ scroll through my messages).  I'm not sure
what's taking so long, perhaps the iconlist?

3) I'm pretty sure I don't like the layout of the headers, for a couple of
reasons.  First, it doesn't scale well, i.e. what happens when I want to
view all headers?  I don't think it will look good to have a dozen of those
text boxes.  Also, what about longer headers?  If we attempt to show a long
"Recieved" header it won't fit in the text box (on my screen at least).
Putting the headers in the GtkText widget, in a different colour perhaps,
would be a better approach IMHO.

4) Final nit-pick: the layout needs some cleaning;  The separation between
icon list and message pane was ill-defined and looked bad when selecting an
attachment that could not be displayed in the preview pane.  Perhaps a
GtkVPaned widget with a thin gutter could be used?  Also, I found the icon
list being displayed when it wasn't a multi-part message to look odd.  There
was also some strange spacing between the bottom of the icon list and the
whole message frame.  None of these are biggies from a functional point of
view, bt we want the interface to look nice for a final release.

Despite the above, I think the patch is a phenominal piece of work, and I
would be very positive for including it... but not for 0.8.0.  It's just not
"production quality" yet.  However this should be a priority for our next
version, as it provides functionality that a lot of people need.

MBG

-- 
Matthew Guenther                      Friends are relatives you make for
mguenthe@engr.uvic.ca                 yourself.
http://www.netcom.ca/~mguenthe/