501576 - Useless space in Card Summary Pane

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[bill]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.22 (20090605)

There is too much useless space in the Card Summary Pane.  Ideally, one wants to have the maximum space at the top for the list of people, and yet to be able to see all the card details in the Summary Pane, without having to scroll up and down or alter the height of the window.  I make four suggestions:

1. Omit the space between the various groups of data.  This is surely easily done.  The space under "Contact" is particularly tall.

2. Remove the heavy line from under the already large heading "Card for ...".

3. For those of us with wide screens, allow us the option of formatting the Card Summary Pane with two, three or four columns so that it fits in less vertical space. 

4. Place each heading ("Contact", "Home", "Other", ...) to the left of the first line of data rather than on a line of its own.  This save a line each time.  This would be less important if the three or four columns in point 3 above were implemented.



Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[bill]

Further requests about the Card Summary Pane. (I am currently switching over the Tbird address book, and some things are turning out to be a bit clumsy.)

5. There could be an option to open the Card Summary Pane as a separate window.  This would make it possible to have two or more cards open at once.  This is often very desirable during a phone conversation, when you don't want to be distracted by scrolling through addresses to switch panes, and perhaps also switching address books.

6. There is no 'copy' option by right-clicking on a name.  This would be very useful when, for example, filling in two or more cards for people in the same family with the same address, or filling  group of colleagues with the same workplace.

7. Since the 'Last name' is stored as a separate field, there should be an option to display the name as 'John Smith' (which looks far more friendly), but to sort the names on the surname 'Smith'.  This should be quite a simple addition.

8. The often-requested options to eliminate duplicate names really do need implementation.  After laboriously moving gathered email address to other address books, I now find that Tbird is collecting those email addresses all over again!  Sorting these out will apparently prove a never-ending chore.

Comment 2

[bill]

9.  Further suggestion after using the address book for some days:  Create a 'Layout' option in 'View' that puts the Card Summary Pane in a separate full column on the right, in the same way that the Tbird email viewer can place the mail previewer on the right using the 'Vertical View' option in 'View' -> 'Layout'.  This would allows a full column of names in the central pane, thus reducing the need for scrolling.  With this option, the items in the Card Summary Pane would need to be displayed in a vertical list rather than in a two-column list.

Comment 3

[Nikolay Shopik]

Did you tried TB3 beta 2? address book changes significant there.

Comment 4

[bill]

Thanks.  I've now risked downloaded Beta 2 - everything worked OK, apart from extensions.   The layout of the Card Summary Pane is unchanged, however, apart from there being slightly less vertical space under "Contact".

My nine recommendations above therefore remain unchanged.  I think the most important of these are:
5. Option for Card Summary pane in separate window.
9. Option for Card Summary Pane in full column to the right.