Breaking the egg

Some small fixes (and a large one!) for Thunderbird’s UI…

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:00:43 -0500

Some small fixes (and a large one!) for Thunderbird’s UI…:

There are certainly some interesting thoughts here, and if people wanted to pick up the smaller ones, and drive them into the product, that would make me quite happy. :)

Re thunderbird tabs on top rationale: If you need to change the thunderbird so much in order to accomodate for extra functions - like calendars or advanced searches or whatever - so much that the new design has disadvantages on e-mail usability - that may be a heavy indication that all these things are sufficiently different to NOT belong into an e-mail client. Why not remember the old Unix motto: One task, one tool. That way, we can keep one layout for e-mailers, and another for calendars.

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 20:44:45 -0500

I haven’t seen any data that suggests that placing the toolbar below the tabs has any disadvantage on e-mail usability. Some people don’t like it, but that’s hardly justification for your claim.

Furthermore, two of the main tasks we hope to put in tabs are composing email and looking up addresses. Both of those have their own toolbars with different buttons from the message window’s. And both of those are functions which have been in Thunderbird for years. (Perhaps Thunderbird should split up into an mh-style set of programs, but I think you’ld be hard pressed to try convincing the current community that that would be a good direction to go.) I will also assert that being able to easily add meeting invitations from e-mail messages to your calendar is an important part of many people’s jobs, and that there is a lot of use in being able to quickly and accurately find messages you’ve stored, and so a set of disconnected tools would not be in our users’ best interests.

Thanks for your question!

Feedback wanted for Address Book Prototype

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:10:02 -0400

Feedback wanted for Address Book Prototype:

Mike Conley has been hacking furiously on a new address book, and he’s got a early, web-based prototype for you to give feedback on.

The Modern Address Book is starting it’s first baby steps...

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 12:39:22 -0400

The Modern Address Book is starting it’s first baby steps towards being something useful!

There’s a long way to go, but this is a good first step.

A long time ago, I worked on an experimental addon that would...

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:07:02 -0400

A long time ago, I worked on an experimental addon that would make Thunderbird more useful for small screens. It was eventually named TbAir. But it never really went anywhere, sadly. The code is available on Github if anyone wants to run with it. Pull requests will be happily accepted. :)

Help me find the menu toolbar -- I don't have the three lines on the right and I mistakenly unchecked my "menu" on the toolbar drop down

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 14:44:07 -0400

Right-click on an empty spot in the tab bar, and there should be a “Menu Bar” item. Click on that, and your menu bar should re-appear. (Also, if you hit “alt”, it should show up, so you can still use the keyboard shortcuts you’re used to.)

The Thunderbird Menu Button (a work in progress). (Yes, I think...

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:04:00 -0400

The Thunderbird Menu Button (a work in progress).

(Yes, I think we should remove a bunch of the things from the top level, and will be saying that in the bug.)

What should we put in the Thunderbird button?

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:17:06 -0400

Now that tabs-on-top has been released, many people are suggesting that we should implement (or should have implemented) a Thunderbird button, like the Firefox button. The main blocker on that was that we’re waiting for Test Pilot to show us what actions people take in Thunderbird, but in the meantime, let’s do a straw-poll.

As politely as possible, what functions do you expect to see in a Thunderbird button?

To keep the answers to a reasonable length, only post the top 3-5 items you would want, please.

Thanks,
Blake.

And Windows 7. (The menu button is the three lines to the right...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:37:00 -0500

And Windows 7.

(The menu button is the three lines to the right of the toolbar…)

From the exceedingly talented shorlander! :)

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:19:59 -0500

From the exceedingly talented shorlander! :)

It’s coming along…

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:05:07 -0500

It’s coming along…

About Toggling Tabs on Top...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:05:55 -0500

Tabs on top is scheduled to land in Thunderbird 11, and we’re pretty excited.

A few folks on Bugzilla have been wondering about how they can switch back to Tabs on Bottom, and have been shocked to find that such a toggle is missing. A bug was filed by a concerned user, asking us to put the toggle in. They were concerned that we were restricting customization and flexibility by not allowing them to change the tabs UI.

However, this lack of a toggle was a conscious decision, and was not made lightly.

I gave our reasoning in the bug, and I thought I’d include a copy here as well. Here goes:

Hey all,

So I’m going to talk a bit about the decision to move tabs in Thunderbird above the mail toolbar - and, more specifically, the decision to leave the UI toggle to move the tabs back to below the toolbar out.

When it comes to UI stuff, I can get pretty hand-wave-y and long-winded. In a departure from this, I’m going to try to be succinct here - please don’t interpret this as rudeness or brusqueness! :D

In Firefox, you have a back button, a forward button, and a URL bar to tell you where you are. With these rudimentary tools, the toolbar is easily generalizable to the act of navigation. This works for Firefox, because this is what Firefox *is* - a tool for navigating around the web. A high percentage of the things that you can do in Firefox involve navigation. Even in the Add-ons Manager, or Bookmarks Manager, the browser toolbar could make sense as a navigation interface (though we don’t seem to make those available - in fact, in the Add-ons Manager, we’ve created *new* back and forward buttons for navigation).

Where the browser toolbar *doesn’t* make sense, is in a place where navigation has less meaning. I’m going to pick on the Downloads Manager, for example. Firefox does not have the browser toolbar as part of the Downloads Manager, and outside of an add-on, such a customization is not really possible.

The reasoning behind this is obvious - having a back/forward/URL tools in the Downloads Manager makes very little sense.

So, the conclusion we can draw from this is: a shared toolbar makes sense in contexts that share the primary activity of that toolbar. This is why Firefox can get away with tabs-on-bottom for most of their UI.

Now, on to Thunderbird.

The rationale behind tabs-on-top in Thunderbird is somewhat different from Firefox’s. In Thunderbird, a tab can be many other things than just another Inbox tab.

Lightning, for example, gives us a tab that becomes a full-blown Calendering client. Unfortunately, they’ve had to deal with tabs-on-bottom, and have therefore been forced to shoehorn Calendering UI into the mail toolbar. If you’ve used Lightning, you know what I’m talking about.

This is not unique to Lightning. When viewing a content tab in Thunderbird, the mail toolbar above the content really makes very little sense - just like having the browser navigation bar in the Downloads Manager would make very little sense.

This is also quite restrictive. Thunderbird’s UI trajectory is tending towards more tab types (Search, Instant Messaging, eventually Compose in a tab, eventually Address Book in a tab). Having the toolbar exist *within* the tabs allows us a separation between these functions - and allows for a greater degree of customization *within* those tabs.

So I don’t think it’s fair to say that preventing tabs-on-bottom is making Thunderbird less configurable. On the contrary, I suggest that enforcing tabs-on-top is an investment that *ensures* greater flexibility and customization in the future.

All the best,

-Mike

Hey! Do you know, whether Thunderbird will get a two-line-message-view like MS Outlook or Apple Mail in the next version(s)?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:32:22 -0500

I’m pretty sure it won’t since a bunch of people have tried to do it, and it’s turned out to be way harder than you might think. It’s definitely something we would like, but at this point we don’t have the resources to make it happen for the next few versions…

Thanks for the question!

A thought about integrating chat into Thunderbird from Florian.

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:11:00 -0500

A thought about integrating chat into Thunderbird from Florian.

Proposed New AddressBook UI: Part 2.

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:46:23 -0400

Proposed New AddressBook UI: Part 2.

Proposed New AddressBook UI: Part 1.

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:07:18 -0400

Proposed New AddressBook UI: Part 1.

A followup on the previous image.

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:27:17 -0400

A followup on the previous image.:

Any help implementing these things would be more than welcome!

With authentic spam. :)

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:18:17 -0400

With authentic spam. :)

New address book mockup.

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:49:17 -0400

New address book mockup.

More Tabs on Top goodness. What’s new? We’ve hidden...

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:50:18 -0400

More Tabs on Top goodness. What’s new?

We’ve hidden the menu bar.
The toolbar now changes based on tab type.
More stuff that we didn’t show here.

We still need to talk about the colours of the toolbar, and think a little more about the search results screen, but progress is being made!