518638 - Icon and text inconsistencies for toolbar and message header area

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Saul Tannenbaum]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090915 Lightning/1.0pre Thunderbird/3.0b4

With the changes to the toolbar and the default move of functionality from the tool bar to the message header area, a number of text and graphic inconsistencies have been introduced:

- Action text. In the tool bar, the words are capitalized "Get Mail". In the header area they are all lower case "reply list". 

- Except, if one junks a message, the button to unjunk is capitalized "Not Junk".

- That button's position moves to the message body area, so one cannot simply press again to undo what you've done.

- The visual display of the Junk Mail status in the message body area uses the same icon as Delete in the tool bar. If the junked mail had been marked for delete, that might be correct, but it doesn't seem to be.

- There is internal inconsistency with respect to the button in the message header area. That is, the labels are words, words, words, words, icon. That doesn't track for me. I'm embarrassed to say that it took me a some time to figure out how one deletes a message since "doesn't track for me" meant that I didn't even recognize this as a trashcan.

- The drop down menus from "other actions" and from "reply all" are, unlike other menus, all lower case.





Reproducible: Always




The lack of consistency in these UI elements, IMHO, detracts from the professional polish of Thunderbird.

Comment 1

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

> - Action text. In the tool bar, the words are capitalized "Get Mail". In the
> header area they are all lower case "reply list". 

This is intentional and has been discussed to death in other bugs; it's WONTFIX.

> - Except, if one junks a message, the button to unjunk is capitalized "Not
> Junk".
> 
> - That button's position moves to the message body area,

The reasoning here is that they're actually separate buttons: one is part of a toolbox at the top of the header, another is in a notification bar below the header.
 
> so one cannot simply press again to undo what you've done.

If one regards these as separate buttons, not a single toggle, it feels expected. 

Having these as separate buttons rather than a single toggle does have the disadvantage that you point out.  I don't have a feel for all the tradeoffs involved in this decision, perhaps clarkbw can provide some detail here...
 
> - The visual display of the Junk Mail status in the message body area uses the
> same icon as Delete in the tool bar. If the junked mail had been marked for
> delete, that might be correct, but it doesn't seem to be.

I'm not seeing this on Mac.  Can you provide a screenshot illustrating?

> - There is internal inconsistency with respect to the button in the message
> header area. That is, the labels are words, words, words, words, icon. That
> doesn't track for me. I'm embarrassed to say that it took me a some time to
> figure out how one deletes a message since "doesn't track for me" meant that I
> didn't even recognize this as a trashcan.

This is an interesting point.  As per bug 465138, comment 30, I expect to implement icons/text/both, which should fix this.

> - The drop down menus from "other actions" and from "reply all" are, unlike
> other menus, all lower case.

Also by design, discussed to death elsewhere, and WONTFIX.

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

> > - The visual display of the Junk Mail status in the message body area uses the
> > same icon as Delete in the tool bar. If the junked mail had been marked for
> > delete, that might be correct, but it doesn't seem to be.
> 
> I'm not seeing this on Mac.  Can you provide a screenshot illustrating?

Ah, I see what's going on: one needs to first use "Customize Toolbar" to put the Delete button into the main toolbar.  Yes, I agree that this is confusing and that we should replace one of the two the icons.

Comment 3

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: patch to fix the issue

Comment 4

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Comment on attachment 403251 [details] [diff] [review]
patch to fix the issue

setting dmose as the reviewer instead

Comment 5

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Comment on attachment 403251 [details] [diff] [review]
patch to fix the issue

Thanks; r=dmose.

Comment 6

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/06581ac81a09