457270 - address book should open in a tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1705276

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement, P5)

Description

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

with the new tabbing interface in bug 218999 we should be moving the address book to open in a tab as well instead of a separate window.

see the tab mockup:
http://clarkbw.net/designs/tabbing/thundertab/thundertab-addrbook.png

This would also (as a nice side effect) fix up bugs like bug 352668

Comment 1

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

just setting the priorities right on this one.  While it would be a good move for the overall consistency of TB3 this wouldn't be the greatest win in terms of user experience.  Other improvements like changing the editing, display, and listing of contacts would have a much greater impact on our users.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Agree AB in a tab will be nice for many users.  As the intention is implied to do away with the standalone window, I'm suspicious doing so may cause pain in some use cases (said selfishly).

Also, I'm not sure I would like AB taking an open tab space. SO can you clarify exactly what might happen by clicking the AB icon?

Comment 4

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

Like a lot of the other tabs we're probably going to provide an option to open any tab in a ( New Window ) just for this type of  problem.

The current AB interface wasn't designed for use inside a tab.  Part of the reason this improvement has been backed off on priority is that opening the current AB in a tab would provide a pretty awkward experience.  Hopefully in a future re-designed AB view clicking on the icon will open up a nice interface for contacts that's designed to use more window space.

Comment 5

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

Not a solution, but we have an existing address book inside tabs demo up here
http://hg.mozilla.org/users/clarkbw_gnome_org/glodabook

Comment 6

[Pete Riley]

"The requested URL /users/clarkbw_gnome_org/glodabook was not found on this server."  :)

Comment 7

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

http://hg.mozilla.org/users/clarkbw_gnome.org/glodabook

Comment 10

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

If someone wants to code this up, drivers would consider accepting it for the branch, depending on how disruptive the change is; marking wanted+.

Comment 11

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Hendrik would like to take on this bug for the last few weeks of his NUS CS3108 course, assigning to him.

Comment 12

[hendrik]

Thanks Gary..

Comment 13

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

After discussions with clarkbw and among ourselves, this bug turns out to be more than a fortnight's or so of useful work (excluding getting up to speed on the TB codebase), so unfortunately Hendrik has decided to move his attention to another bug...

Comment 14

[Armond Avanes]

This breaks the consistency of the new tabbed UI. Won't we really see this fixed for Thunderbird 3.0 final?

Comment 15

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Only if someone steps up to the plate to do the work.

Comment 16

[Joey Minta]

I'd like to learn a bit about the tab-mail setup, and this bug seems like a good opportunity to do so. I'll take a stab at it.

Comment 17

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Adding asuth, as he's re-done a bunch of the tabbing infrastructure of late.  Andrew, are there more changes coming down that pike that we should be aware of?

Comment 18

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

My outstanding changes are only related to folder display.

While the address book can be easily embedded in a tab by using an iframe, netting it its own global JS context (nice for sanity), the menu options are likely to be problematic.  The tabmail widget has no abstraction for dealing with changes to the menu based on the active tab.  Not that I'm sure having the menus dance a little jig is great for UX anyways.

Comment 19

[Joey Minta]

My current approach takes advantage of the perTabPanel part of the tab infrastucture, but by embedding the address book in an xbl widget, rather than an iframe. (perTabPanel: "ab-tab",)

I'm also not sure about the solution to the menu issue. There aren't *that* many operations relevant to the address book, and finding button space for the typical add/delete stuff isn't too bad.  Still, I'd definitely appreciate any time/help clarkbw has to offer on that front.

Comment 20

[u235898]

(In reply to comment #17)
> Adding asuth, as he's re-done a bunch of the tabbing infrastructure of late. 
> Andrew, are there more changes coming down that pike that we should be aware
> of?

e.g:
see bug 449299

while reading asut's comment or other related bugs as those above, these topics seems not to be handled "in a concept", right?! Perhaps this bug and related "tab-bugs" might be a greater point in the Mozilla QM Team?!
(I know not the "correct" way to whine here as a "stupid user" but tell me a better for discussing that?!...I often read "yea, would be nice but noone here who can do this" and/or "there are other problems like such gui improvements"...THAT's boring and not really adequate to bring TB3 to the masses as an professional eMail Platform with integrated calendar!

Perhaps someone might maintain a thunderbird doc page like http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/ which might help to identify and coordinate those problems and open todos??!! (can't find anything like this for thunderbird 3) 

With kind regards
~Marcel

Comment 21

[Joey Minta]

Attachment: wip

Work in progress. Very rough/incomplete at this point, but I'm putting it here (1) as backup and (2) potentially for structural comments, if the relevant devs are so inclined.

Comment 22

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

It seems I've had some discussion on email about this bug which never made it here :-(

I think the general summary is that just replicating the existing UI into a tab doesn't actually do much for us - it seems to be an ideal time to lift the UI to a new level (e.g. see Bryan's glodabook referenced in comment 7).

Bryan's thought at the time was that it is going to be complicated to figure out how to do - especially when merging menu items (with address book in a window it can "own" the window, in a tab it can't do that) and working out what to do with the toolbar items.

Hence the thought was to start from user requirements and build address book in a tab from that (one suggestion being to be able to open contacts in their own tab and have a list of what conversations you've had). I've done some work on what users want to do with address book but it needs a lot of fleshing out and was really aimed at post TB 3.


That is roughly what was said at the time, given that I frequently see address book in a tab as a request from users having used early versions of TB 3 it may be that we do want to try this merge or something simpler maybe. I think we do want to take guidance from Bryan here though.

Comment 23

[Armond Avanes]

(In reply to comment #22)

> Hence the thought was to start from user requirements and build address book in
> a tab from that (one suggestion being to be able to open contacts in their own
> tab and have a list of what conversations you've had). I've done some work on
> what users want to do with address book but it needs a lot of fleshing out and
> was really aimed at post TB 3.

I like the idea of seeing conversations you've had with a contact, in a view specially designed for this purpose.

Comment 24

[Christoph Grether]

One of the big problems, with the AB in a tab was the toolbar. I've played a bit with Spicebird - another TB clone and saw, that it has a very nice solution for that problem. Each thing in a tab has it's own customizable toolbar. 
The contents change on the fly, when switching from e.g. "Calendar" to "Contacts".

Here is a screenshot of the adressbook in a tab:

http://stashbox.org/591672/spice.png

With individuel customizable toolbars, should it be also possible to fix Bug 449299 as well.

I hope, if you ever implement the ability to open the AB in a tab, that we won't see an 'adress boook' icon in the tabbar. I mean we have buttons, in toolbar, in message reader and in the tabbar. It's a little bit weird, isn't it?

Comment 26

[David Burleigh]

What's the chance of this actually being implemented in Thunderbird 3.0?

Comment 27

[Joey Minta]

We're going to need some UI time/work from clarkbw if this is going to move forward. I haven't seen any firm plans regarding mutating toolbars based on tabs, which is one of the key points of moving this in.

Comment 28

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Post Thunderbird 3 we're planning on looking at the contacts experience throughout Thunderbird. Given the set of things we need to fix for TB 3 I'd highly recommend we leave this work till post TB 3 and then we can concentrate on this as part of the contacts experience work.

Comment 29

[David Burleigh]

Oh, that is a sad word, which makes Spicebird look more attactive (except that it doesn't seem to be a very active project lately). The current address book mechanism of Thunderbird is so tedious to use, especially since the contacts sidebar extension is no longer being developed and the lastest version doesn't work for TB3. How I wish you would reconsider! Why not implement a step in the right direction, without feeling that you have to re-engineer the whole thing?

Comment 30

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #29)
> Why not implement a step in the
> right direction, without feeling that you have to re-engineer the whole thing?

The issue with the existing UI is that it doesn't fit well into a tab style. Doing a half-hearted attempt wouldn't gain us much and would be unlikely to increase user adoption. It would also be likely to delay TB 3 longer which we don't want to do. Once we get TB 3 out, we can experiment with new designs against TB 3 via extensions at the same time as reworking the contacts experience.

Comment 33

[Charles]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Like a lot of the other tabs we're probably going to provide an option to open
> any tab in a ( New Window ) just for this type of  problem.

+100

Personally, I don't like tabs, and I'm still waiting on an option to open the Calendar in the current tab (which, combined with setting messages to open in a new window, and hiding the tab bar when only one tab is open, would accomplish the same as disabling the tab bar). I still don't understand why they made the calendar toolbar buttons unmovable from the tab toolbar, that is really irritating.

So, please don't give those of us who wouldn't want this yet another reason to be irritated when using TB... ;)

Comment 34

[philip.gillissen]

The bug 518689 is very similar. Should be reviewed.

Comment 36

[Chris Andrichak]

Maybe this will help?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=925746

Comment 39

[Martin Trinks]

+1 from me, I also would like to have address books in a tab.

Comment 40

[[e-mail]]

I would add my voice behind this one.
And a tab or some link to Reminders. I leave reminders open because I have never found a way to open it when I need it.
Currently if I have the Reminders and Address Book open, Thunderbird takes up 3 tabs in the Windows taskbar. Stupid really. Everything inside Thunderbird should be in Thunderbird. Not taking up space in the Taskbar.
No need for a screenshot, just picture 3 taskbar tabs taken up by one program.