372833 - Move minimonth to its own tab to conserve vertical space

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Calendar :: Lightning Only, enhancement)

Description

[Sven Giermann]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070219 Firefox/2.0.0.2
Build Identifier: Lightning 0.3.1 (build 2007021403)

If you have many mail folders in Thunderbird, the Lightning sidebar consumes much space!

I created a patch to place the MinimonthPick into the tab-panels. Furthermore I collapsed the buttons on the calendar-tab, because all functions are also included in the context menu!

Please note, that I created this UI modification along with the integration of the Sunbird Unifinder scripts, as described in bug 372829 and bug 372830, where I also placed some styling of the calendar-view-box (or view-deck) to better fit the Thunderbird look-and-feel.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Sven Giermann]

Attachment: a more tight integration of Lightning into Thunderbird

Comment 2

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

Sven,
Could you please attach a screenshot of this to make ui-review easier?  Thanks.
(You should also do this for the two unifinder bugs)

Comment 3

[Christian Jansen]

I appreciate the approach of removing the "New", "Edit" & "Delete" Buttons. These three buttons aren't used frequently, and compared to their importance positioned too prominent.

From my point of view it would also make sense to add the "Edit" & "Delete" items to the Calendar menu. Just because a large number of users don't use context menus.

Comment 4

[Sven Giermann]

Attachment: Screenshot of MinimonthPick in its own tab

Comment 5

[Sven Giermann]

Attachment: Screenshot of Calendar tab without buttons

Comment 6

[Joey Minta]

Comment on attachment 257518 [details] [diff] [review]
a more tight integration of Lightning into Thunderbird

+          <!-- SG, 20.02.2007 - collapse or better remove redundant buttons; these are in context menu too -->
+          <hbox id="ltnCalendarButtonsBox" collapsed="true">
  
CVS blame exists for tracking changes, so you don't need to add a comment like this.  Also, if we're going to remove the buttons, we should just remove them, rather than collapsing the box.  No sense making the DOM more complicated than it needs to be.

As expected, the heavy lifting here is going to be with the UI review, but I'd like to see a cleaned patch without the comment and with the buttons actually removed.

Comment 7

[Michael Büttner (no reviews TFN)]

I appreciate the effort to better integrate Lightning into Thunderbird. We already had started on discussing how we could achieve this goal, see [1] for a related newsgroup topic. Currently, the proposal for generally improving the views is documented at [2] and has been announced at [3]. I personally believe that it makes sense to first flesh out the big picture and then move towards this goal with incremental implementation steps. Furthermore, this approach would help productivity since we don't step on each others toes.

As far as I'm concerned this patch conflicts with the proposal since we didn't want to move the minimonth into its own tab. Please don't get me wrong, I really appreciate getting help in order to get this massive task of improving the views done. But I believe that we reach the goal much faster if we first agree on what it finally should look like. Otherwise we lose precious time with discussions that try to move into different directions. Last but not least, the proposal is what the word says - a proposal - nothing is set in stone and we can change it. At least I would like to have UI-review requested for this bug and let the UI owners decide about what the direction should be.

[1]
http://groups.google.org/group/mozilla.dev.apps.calendar/browse_thread/thread/9663d69c1e4a303a/ecd55ea3b98c651e#ecd55ea3b98c651e
[2] http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Improving_the_Calendar_Views
[3]
http://groups.google.org/group/mozilla.dev.apps.calendar/browse_thread/thread/45b31925ef0f6aa6/41f21befb5a042ef#41f21befb5a042ef

Comment 8

[Sven Giermann]

Joey,

thanks for all your hints. Unfortunately I already threw away the separation of all my modifications, so I cannot recreate the patch without much work again.
Furthermore I think I'm not familiar enough with diff-files to write it manually.

Maybe there should also be 2 patches, one for the minimonth and the other for the removal of the buttons.
I think the last on is easy done by deleting 9 lines... I think no diff-file should be needed.
By the way, the comment was more for myself - so I knew what I changed to get it back, if it won't work...


Micheal,

I hope you don't get ME wrong...
This was my very "quick-and-dirty" try to make Lightning more handsome or just to suit my taste. And because I met lots of people here who liked it, I just wanted to publish my proposal.
I never wanted to start a discussion or to complicate the work of the development team!

Just take it "as-is": if you like it, consider integration; if not - nobody cares...

By the way, I would also like these vertical tabs. Maybe the best think would be to have fully customizable UI, vertical tabs (to display more than one at the same time), variable height and perhaps individual positioning of elements as they are in the toolbar.
But for that, many modifications have to be done in Thunderbird itself...

Comment 10

[Sven Giermann]

For anyone who is still interested in this function, have a look to my extension 'ltnPlus':
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/5285

Comment 11

[Sven Giermann]

This bug has become INVALID, since the introdution of the new calendar mode and today pane.