[PATCH] Replacing email selection dialog in kmail

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sunday 30 November 2003 18:57, Zack Rusin wrote:
> On Sunday 30 November 2003 11:18, Tobias Koenig wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > the current email selection dialog (the one which appears when you
> > click on the button next to the 'To', 'Cc' or 'Bcc' field in the
> > mail composer window) really sucks from the technical (bugs) and
> > usability point of view (too much buttons, splitter, missing
> > scrollbars and 3 actions merged into one dialog).
>
> heh, I love how people use the "usability bugs" crap everywhere. The
> dialog that is there has been designed by our usability team. Aaron,
> and four other people from the usability team created it

So maybe any of those five people can explain the usefullness of the 
QSplitters. Or why it's not possible to add a distribution list to the 
list of addressees (and by this I mean the name of the distribution 
list and not all it's members). Why can one Add, Edit or Remove 
contacts from the addressbook in an address _selection_ dialog? Why can 
one save distribution lists from there?

This dialog is a "Eierlegende Wollmilchsau" (in English "A pig which 
gives milk and wool and which lays eggs"). It doesn't really solve the 
task that it is supposed to solve, namely to make it easy for the user 
to select the To, the Cc and the Bcc recipients. (Mostly because of 
many bugs.) Instead it has loads of completely unnecessary 
functionality resp. functionality which is duplicated from the address 
book.

> > I know it's quite late in the release schedule, but also the kmail
> > developer would like to see this dialog be used for 3.2.
>
> There's no way in hell we'll do that. That dialog is crap,

The new one is also crap because it confuses the user with loads of 
unnecessary functionality.

> it's 
> pretty much what we had in 3.1 just with sorting. No distribution
> lists, no idea who's already selected, no idea how to select multiple
> addresses, no categories or groups. It's ok if you have 5 addresses
> in your address book, but with thousands of them it doesn't make any
> sense.

I agree that the dialog that Tobias proposed isn't the solution. Instead 
I'd like to see the following changes in the current dialog:
- Remove the stupid splitters.
- Remove all functionality which doesn't belong in an address selection 
dialog, namely the "Add", "Edit", "Delete" and "Save as distribution 
list" buttons.
- Put all distribution lists under the category Distribution Lists and 
make it possible to actually select a distribution list and not only to 
select the members of the distribution list.
- Fix all the bugs which have been filed with regard to this dialog.

On IRC Tobias has proposed to work on a patch to improve the current 
dialog.

Regards,
Ingo
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