Re: colors in mailbox-list

[Steffen Klemer <masterofheap gmx net>]

Am 2003.08.02 21:55 schrieb(en) Darko Obradovic:
> Am 02.08.2003 07:50 schrieb(en) Steffen Klemer:
>> But as a user a want to know whether there are unread msgs in a thread 
>> or not. Just an Idea, but what about italic-fonts (or because of 
>> accessibility: "emphasized" ones) for collapsed trees?
>> 
>> It would make sense in respect to the other behaviours.
> 
> what you suggest makes sense of course, but it's still totally at will, 
> unrelated to any other behaviour the user might know or expect. So the 
> problem isn't resolvable as easy.
> I'd clearly vote to disallow collapsing threads, as that would eliminate 
> many many usability problems balsa has. One could argue that with a flat 
> index, you can't minimize the number of messages anyways, so threading 
> still has an advantage for structuring. But I don't doubt many people 
> wouldn't want to miss that feature (that's what I'd expect at least), 
> and I have to respect that.

Sure, it's a bit senseless feature, but every gui mailer and newsreader I 
know support collapsings.

How does the other programs handle such situations

Mozilla Mail for example:
You can only collaps whole threads (not all the sub-threads alone) and a 
thread containing unread msgs is underlined.
The first msg of a thread has a special symbol which gets an arrow if 
there are unread mails. Also you can mark all mails in this thread with a 
single click on this icon.

Outlook Express does it exactly the way we do:
You can collapse each subthread individually and if it contains unread 
mails the main-msg of this thread is bold (it looks like this mail would 
be unread but you can distinguish them because of the read and unread-
icons - which as an aside note I personally would like to get back in 
balsa, too.

Once there was the proposal to avoid have a column for each and every flag 
and make one column for all flags. ATM you can't sort it after the flags 
either so the only problem could be screenspace - but these 16 pixels 
should be there, or?

just my 2ct

cu
/Steffen

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