345838 - Change date format to fit column size

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1b1) Gecko/20060710 Firefox/2.0b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1b1) Gecko/20060710 Firefox/2.0b1

From Leander Kahney in Wired:


I just noticed something about Apple's Mail program that perfectly illustrates why people love Apple and its products.

Like most e-mail programs, Mail's main window is divided into columns: "From," "Subject" and "Date," etc.

While I was adjusting the width of the columns, I noticed that the date changes format depending on the width of the column. If the column is wide, the date is displayed as "February 27, 2006." But if you narrow the column, the date changes to a shorter format: "Feb 27, 2006." If you narrow the column even further, the date format changes to the shortest format possible: "2/27/06."

In addition, the time an e-mail message is received is also displayed -- if there's room. If the column is narrowed, the time disappears altogether. in Wired news:



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Resize date column

Actual Results:  
From Leander Kahney in Wired:

The best software, like Mozilla's Thunderbird, sometimes displays an ellipsis as you narrow the column, the three dots indicating that information has been truncated. This happens to the subject column when there's not enough room to display the entire subject line.

Expected Results:  
But only Apple's Mail actually changes the format. When I first discovered this, From Leander Kahney in Wired:

I sat there delighted, making the column wide and then narrow, beaming as the date format switched smoothly and seamlessly between numbers and text to perfectly fit the space allocated.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

confirming, that's nice. And might not be too hard to do, assuming we have some way of finding out the column width from the outliner in the view code.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I'm sorry, I think this is a dumb idea and any resources spent implementing it are resources wasted.

Comment 3

[Ronald Killmer]

I agree it is a nice to have which existing date display add-ins do not address. If it's for lack of an API, then that would be a fair use of resources to create.  Then leave the implementation of the feature to an add-in dev so users can control their display.