Re: [Evolution] Speaking of Pan...

[Andrew Cowie <andrew operationaldynamics com>]

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 19:46, Enver ALTIN wrote:
> Believe it or not, majority of `users' just stick with the default.

I'd love to know how you came up with that authoritative statistic.

> Anyway,

The point I was making is that pan's layout flexibility is impressive.

For me, vertical screen real estate is precious. While I have a lovely
desktop workstation with enormous screens and high resolution, I also
travel a great deal, and so live with my 1024x768 laptop quite a bit.

Evolution doesn't optimize available vertical space all that well, IMHO.
> From my perspective as a user, the status bar at the bottom is largely
unused (messages there appear so briefly that it's rare I ever see what
they are) and the grey bar with the title of the currently selected
folder and it's new/selected/total counts also takes a great deal of
vertical space.

So why do I care? In my experience, the two things I'd like to see lots
of are message index and message body. The trouble with the "preview
pane" sharing vertical space with the message index is that I can't see
a lot of the message index *at the same time* as maximizing how much of
an individual message I can see. 

The pan setting I selected for the screenshot I sent was deliberate -
it's a panel orientation that I can't quite get in Evo, but that would
be cool from my usage perspective.

$0.02

[You know, the funny (sic) thing is that for ages we've been trying to
"shed" the Outlook look; I've personally been long enamoured with this
particular layout available in pan. Just the other day discovered that
Outlook 2003 went and implemented tall vertical panes side by side for
*both* the index and body panels. <sigh> So I'm advocating this because
I think it's a good idea, not because M$ did it :)]

AfC

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd

Australia: +61 2 9977 6866  North America: +1 646 472 5054

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/