297853 - In folderpane the message size, unread and total in thread columns need too much room [fixed width]

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: General, defect)

Description

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 1.0.x and 1.1a1

In Thunderbirds (and Mail/News) message pane, the columns "read", "unread" and
"size" are wasting to much room (See the attached screenshot) because of the
column headers. Using (and translating) text in these column headers needs more
room than the shown information (the numbers). Therefore the folder names on the
left side are abbreviated (e.g.: "Folders.....name").

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a folder using a long name
2. activate the columns in folders pane (all three)



Expected Results:  
We should use small icons instead of the text in these column headers. This
wouln't waste room and it would not be necessary to translate it (most languages
need more room than english).

Comment 1

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

Attachment: screenshot

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
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Comment 3

[Martin Creutziger [:MMx]]

confirming this problem.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Martin, Alexander, Carsten do you see this still, in v2?

Comment 5

[Ronald Killmer]

Oversize columns headers still exist in Tb 2.0.0.6 and are the cause of my disabling the feature.  Even tho the headers are resizable, they can not reduce enough for there width to be consistent with data displayed. This is true even with the MS Nina font which is a compressed font face compared to Trebuchet or Tahoma from which it was derived.

Also the OP screenshot shows the account highlight does not extend the width of the pane.  This is also noted in SPC. I consider it related to toggling the extended columns where themeing is not consistent.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ronald, What is "SPC"?  Do you see this when using trunk build?
 ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/latest-trunk/

Does this happen only with localized versions?  Because I don't see this using en-US distribution. 

Comment 7

[Ronald Killmer]

Sorry for the use of the shortcut name for Sky Pilot Classic theme.

I pulled a en-us nightly 20080424 and also update 2008042412 to evaluated this bug with the default theme and Sky Pilot. I see problems when the 3-pane View is set to Wide or Classic where the folder pane is constrained to the width of news group names (About 2.5 inches with res at 1024x768)

The text labels dictate the Col width, readable there too wide, narrows to numbers, the Col title is ... or unreadable. This effects both themes and I suspect other localizations could be worse. Reducing margin and padding in the CSS will not be a workable solution.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

nother issue affecting intl users

Comment 9

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Wouldn't block for this.

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Attachment: partial fix, wip

This patch would be a partial fix, it now reuses some other icons just for testing. Also needs the same theme change for pinstripe.

So, anybody feelin' artistic, and want to whip up some icons:)? I'd suggest some sigma sign for the total, but I'm low on ideas for the unread and size colunms.

Comment 11

[Ronald Killmer]

The Read icon could be the pair of eye glasses from the default theme toolbar Mark button. The Mathematical sigma is a good idea.

That leaves the Size to brainstorm.  How about an outline of a box when there are no new msgs and a solid two box color box split diagonally. Idea is to look like a 1 to 1 linear graph.
___
|/|
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Comment 12

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

Maybe we could use a floppy / harddisk icon for folders size. The same icon could be used in threadpane as column header for the message size column

Comment 13

[Ronald Killmer]

Attachment: Size Icon candidate

Made this 16x16 px Icon to flesh out the ASCII Art.

Comment 14

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

A floppy or disk for size sounds like a good idea. Note that the icon should be gray scale like the other icons (such as flag-col.png, attachment-col.png).

Comment 15

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

a floppy disk generally indicates [save] and not really size.  Even the floppy icon is on it's way out as a large percentage of young people don't know what a floppy disk is anymore.

You could try a hard drive icon as those are becoming common.

Comment 16

[Ronald Killmer]

I have been doing some research for this bug.  What I have now with my Tb 2.0.0.16 build with the Sky Pilot Classic theme (SPC) are some CSS rules to 1) set a min-width to each of the three cols; 2) turn off the text labels; 3) assign transparent Bg PNG icons. My CSS was added to the userChrome.css by adding three selectors per Col. What took me a while to learn is there is an Image node having a hidden "list-style-image:" set to none. The class is .treecol-sortdirection 

I used this and assigned url("read16x.png"), etc. I still have some tweaking I want to do. For now this is an update. I want to revise my Unread icon to narrow it by 0.2em.

Comment 17

[Ronald Killmer]

Attachment: Waterfall size display

Settled on a representation of the waterfall display of a graphic equalizer to try capturing the concept of size variance. Still 16px high but wider than prior icon.

Comment 18

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I think those need to be 16x16, and like I said before - gray scale.

Comment 19

[Ronald Killmer]

Attachment: Sigma as Total icon

This design is the math Sigma and is a 16 x 16px black on gray scheme.

Comment 20

[Ronald Killmer]

Since the Extended Cols were dropped by Thunderbird 3.0 and there return is Wontfix, See Bug 464973, then this bug might only be valid for SM.

Comment 21

[Frederic Bezies]

Removing extended columns is the baddest thing to do. Thunderbird will see user fly away because of this simple missing feature.

Comment 22

[Ronald Killmer]

Feel free to use the Icons I contributed.  I am removing myself from the CC of this bug.