[Kde-pim] GSoC 2014- Active Mail

[Michael Bohlender]

>
> By settings you mean the Account Settings, Favourites, Filters and all,
> right?
> I got that in the UI, but I looked in the binaries folder, I couldn't find
> any separate settings app..  Could you point me to it?
>

The settings app is global for plasma active and not specific for PIM. It
can be found in the plasma-mobile repository.

> About the UI.. I noticed several things as a new user -
>
> 1. The settings, when clicked, there are 5 buttons for it. Shouldn't there
> be a panel that opens when the settings button is clicked?
> And considering that the whole app should confirm with the smoothness of
> Plasma Active, shouldn't Settings be included as a
> slideout panel instead of having a button for it?

Yes, the UI can use some improvement.

> 2.The Account and the Identities settings open as a new dialog, widget
> based most probably (I haven't looked at the code yet), they should also
> open like the Favourite, Filter and the About settings ( a slide in window
> of the app).

They should go into a module for the settings app and not be part of the
application.

> 3. The Favourite settings don't contain anything, just a blank template. I
> could implement this part. From what I understand -
>     a) This should contain the favourite folders according to the user's
> preferences.
>     b) It should provide settings for selecting existing folders or
> creating new ones to be in the Favourites section. If a new favourites
>         folder is created it should provide settings for mails to be
> included in the folder probably filtered by date or a particular sender or
> a
>         group of senders.
>     c) It should provide the user with options to add/delete/modify the
> favourite folders. This should be done by obtaining various inputs
>         from the user.
>     d) Once folders in this section have been created, they should be
added
> as a tab in the main panel ( the one with inbox, drafts, sent
>         mail etc tabs..)

Hm. This should actually work but only look ugly. I can't check because I
won't be near my laptop until April. Given that we are planing to switch to
a searchfolder approach it is possible that this feature will be removed.

> 4. Once a particular tab is selected, Inbox for instance, I have to click
> on the arrow above to view the mails. Shouldn't it re-adjust it's size and
> automatically show the mails, instead of the user having to click on the
> arrow to go back and forth?

Yes.

> 5. Once a particular tab is selected, the focus shifts completely to it,
> the other folders dissapear and if one needs to go some other folder, he
> has to go back and select the respective tab for it. IMHO it would be more
> helpful if the focus temporarily shifted to that tab but all other tabs
> remained visible and the user could select any tab at any time, saving
many
> user gestures.

You should be able to navigate by swiping through the pages.

> 6. I noticed that some mails take more time to load and some don't load at
> all..

I thought that bug was gone...
Will investigate...

And the panel that shows the list of mails, it doesn't have a
> scrollbar area ( just scrolls by my mouse wheel ) and the Mail viewer
> doesn't have a scroll option at all (Big mails can't be read fully)!

This is a touch app. Scrolling works by dragging.

> 7. When viewing the mail, those three small buttons at the top for
> replying, as far as I could understand, they don't have any tooltip or
> something like that and the buttons are quite generic and don't provide
> much information about their functionality. Instead there could be more
> descriptive buttons?

Again, this is a touch application it is not meant for desktop use. There
is no mouse over and therefore no tooltip on touch applications.

We had the idea of a drag-down button. So that you have one default reply
button that you can hold and drag down to get a drag down menu that could
contain the icons as well as ad descriptive text.

> And for the account configuration, I don't know much about mail
> configurations, the settings seem pretty elaborate to me. The only thing I
> noticed was that the dialog doesn't match the whole theme of the app and
> this would need fixing.
> Could you tell me what all settings should be implemented which are not
> there currently?

Well this is exactly the point of your project.
The dialog is still qwidget based. Your mission would be to expose the
functionality to qml and then build a UI on top of this.

> I haven't looked at the coding part yet, am still reading QML resources
and
> trying to understand how it all fits together. Hopefully in a day or so I
> will be able to look at it from that angle too. So these are just cursory
> UI observations which I think can be fixed. :)
>
> Suggestions/inputs? Coding tips? What I can include as the scope of my
> project? :)

Well, this is your project. You decide the scope.
I would advise you to go for the (account) settings, because it is a fairly
well contained project.  You can always choose to do more, if you finish to
early. Almost all the things you listed above are valid things to work on.
You could list them in your proposal as optional / additional tasks.

What ever you choose, choose fast and submit to your initial proposal to
melange. We can discuss and fine tune it there. We are in a bit of a hurry
with the deadline. ; )

I am looking forward to read your proposal.

Regards

Mike
_______________________________________________
KDE PIM mailing list kde-pim at kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim
KDE PIM home page at http://pim.kde.org/