[Kde-pim] IMAP/Pop3 Config UIs

[Volker Krause]

On Monday 29 March 2010 21:50:18 Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> On Sunday 28 March 2010, Casey Link wrote:
> > I've taken the comments into consideration, and tried to improve the
> > mockups.
> >
> > As suggested, the detailed, technical options were moved to an
> > Advanced tab. Because this would have resulted in their being 4
> > dialogs, I removed the IMAP settings tab and placed those options
> > under advanced in order to keep the complexity of the dialog low.
> >
> > I added the port and description fields to the General tab, and moved
> > the subscription settings to Advanced.
> >
> > I simplified the wall of authentican options into a ComboBox, and for
> > the sake of comparison showed the port number in the Advanced tab
> > too, because I think it might do better their (as opposed to in the
> > General Tab).
> >
> > The "Empty" Label and progress bar are for showing the status of the
> > autodetection.
>
> Will people understand what the progress bar means? Actually, I'm not
> even sure what this progress bar is supposed to indicate. Is it the
> quota?
>
> I would put the Connection Settings on a separate tab. Reasoning:
> Today's displays are much wider than tall and especially displays of
> netbooks and, even more so, the display of the N900 are awfully limited
> in height. The mock-up is 628 pixels tall. So it won't fit on an 800x600
> screen. And that without even taking the task bar into account which
> might reduce the height even more (unless it's on the left instead of at
> the bottom). IMO our dialogs should be optimized for wide displays.

while I don't disagree with that (especially for netbooks), forget about 
devices like the N900 here, even if our dialogs technically fit on their 
screen (800x480 for the N900), they are not usable there in any way. Due to 
the extremely high physical (dpi) resolution, the dialog is so small that you  
can hardly operate it with the stylus. To make it finger-operatable you can 
have at most five rows of UI elements on the screen at the same time, so we 
need a different dialog layout anyway. In fact we have that already for the 
current IMAP resource, there is a _desktop.ui and a _mobile.ui file 
(switchable via KDEPIM_MOBILE_UI in CMake), thanks to KConfigXT that's the 
only thing you have to change, all the code can stay the same :)

> Also, a lot of the options present in the current IMAP Settings are
> missing, e.g. "local subscription", "namespaces" and a few others (that
> might not really be needed). Okay, local subscription might not be
> necessary anymore because the caching options can be specified per
> folder, but what about namespaces? Do we assume that namespaces always
> work and thus are not necessary in the dialog? (They definitely do not
> work out-of-the-box for all IMAP servers.)
>
> Also, "local subscription" could be useful for netbooks or smart phones
> where you don't want to see the full list of folders, but just a few
> important ones. Or can this be selected elsewhere? If yes, where?

Local subscription is no longer resource-specific, but build into Akonadi 
itself.  Unfortunately not really finished yet though. Anyway, it's nothing 
resources need to implement themselves anymore.

> The more I think about it, I don't think we should deviate too much from
> the current IMAP account settings dialog.
>
> The changes on the General tab are mostly okay, but the proposal for
> setting the mail check interval is a no-go because it is not
> localizable. In some localizations the spin box will have to be in the
> middle of the text or even on the left of the text.
>
> I like the combobox for the authentication methods.
>
> I don't like the choice of encryption settings. Does SSL with STARTTLS
> make sense? Does TLS without STARTTLS make any sense? Is the user
> supposed to enter the port manually if he needs the imaps port instead
> of the imap port? (Currently, we use the imaps port if the user selects
> SSL. Otherwise, we use the standard imap port. So, usually, the user
> doesn't need to worry about the port.)

regards
Volker
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